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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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An Art Newspaper article, arguing that attacking and damaging works of art in order to protest against issues such as the climate crisis achieves nothing. 

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An Art Newspaper article, arguing that attacking and damaging works of art in order to protest against issues such as the climate crisis achieves nothing. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can the damage of art in the name of protest ever be justified?

KEY TERMS Civilised society, Pointless, Cultural violence, Iconoclasm

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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"Are you ready?" the curator said to a group of us huddled around a plastic crate covered by a tea towel. We nodded, and as he pulled back the tea towel, we saw Margaret Thatcher's decapitated head staring back at us, eyes pale and slightly crazed. Beside us was the rest of her in marble form, as a full-length statue by the sculptor Neil Simmons. Her handbag was still neatly clasped to her waist, but the break at her neck was as clean as a guillotine's chop.

It was 2002, and I had just started working for the late Labour MP Tony Banks, then in charge of the House of Commons Works of Art Committee. The statue had been commissioned to stand in the Members' Lobby, just outside the House of Commons. But because Thatcher was still alive, the committee wanted to loan the statue to the Guildhall Art Gallery until the day came when Parliament could suitably memorialise her in death, rather than be seen to lionise her in life. And it was at the Guildhall where, shortly after Simmons's work had been unveiled by Thatcher herself, the statue was attacked by a protester with a cricket bat.

Our job, as we huddled around Thatcher's severed head, was to wonder what to do next. In a statement, Banks said that while the statue ranked "among our most controversial commissions, acts of vandalism against works of art can never be tolerated in a civilised society". I remember he felt this genuinely, even though he had been among Thatcher's most effective and fervent Parliamentary critics. He recognised that allowing art, especially public art, to become a target of protest was always a thin-end-of-the-wedge moment.

Then the discussion turned to whether we should repair the statue. Practically, it looked possible, but politically it was another matter. Could the House of Commons really commemorate Thatcher with a statue that had once been decapitated? If it did, then the protester would be commemorated too, for the nature of his attack meant that art and act would forever be associated. And no matter how well the head was reattached, over time the join would become visible.

So it was decided that the statue could no longer go into parliament. A new statue, this time in bronze, was commissioned from Antony Dufort, and is now in the Members' Lobby. Simmons's (repaired) marble statue is still at the Guildhall, parked in a corridor.

More than 20 years on, I wonder what Thatcher's metaphorical executioner achieved. Is anybody more aware of Thatcher's controversial legacy? Did those affected by her policies have their lives improved? I doubt it. What might have felt, for a brief moment, like a radical, daring act, will be remembered for what it was: a pointless act of cultural violence.

Those who excuse such attacks point out that art and protest have long gone together, as if one iconoclasm justifies another. It must be tempting, if you support a protester's cause, to support their protest too. We have seen this with Just Stop Oil's pretend attacks in the Louvre, National Gallery and elsewhere. "Surely, the planet is more important than art," they say. And it is. If you could prove to me that climate change, or war in the Middle East, could be stopped by destroying a painting, I would throw the soup myself. But, as Tony Banks recognised, when looking at the severed head of his greatest political opponent, destroying art achieves nothing.

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'Why destroying art in protest achieves nothing'

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Activists' attacks on artworks do not further their causes-if they did, I would throw the soup myself

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A Conversation article*, exploring the difficulties of reconciling the moral obligations of a religious faith with the laws of the society in which it exists.  

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A Conversation article*, exploring the difficulties of reconciling the moral obligations of a religious faith with the laws of the society in which it exists.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does it offer of tensions between immigration policies and religious groups’ commitments to humanitarian care? What arguments do some religious leaders accused of breaking immigration laws present to defend their actions? What does this story indicate about the different priorities for governments and religious traditions? Overall, which perspective should take precedent when we form our moral outlooks on the world: the religion, or the state, to which we belong? How can they be reconciled when they clash?

KEY TERMS Religious freedoms, Violated, Motivations, Cultural, Globalizing world

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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Many religious traditions preach the need to care for strangers. But what happens when caring for the stranger comes into conflict with government policy?

After Title 42 restrictions at the U.S. border ended on May 11, 2023, debates about immigration have heated up again - focused mostly on reform, border security or refugees' needs.

But the treatment of immigrants is deeply intertwined with religious freedom as well. As a scholar of religious ethics who studies immigration, I am interested in recent cases that highlight growing tensions between immigration policies and religious groups' commitments to pastoral and humanitarian care.

Ministry at the border

One high-profile example centers on Rev. Kaji Douša, senior pastor at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City, who traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, in 2018 to provide pastoral care to asylum seekers.

Her work was flagged by Customs and Border Protection after a Honduran woman allegedly said that Douša told migrants that marrying each other would make it easier to receive legal papers in the U.S. As Douša later testified, she did perform religious ceremonies, but only for couples who were already in common-law marriages and without claiming to provide any legal status.

Douša's name and photo were added to a Department of Homeland Security watch list that included lawyers, journalists and activists, and she was detained and questioned by CBP officers upon her return to the U.S. A CBP official also sent an email to Mexican authorities asking them to ban Douša from entering Mexico because she lacked proper documentation - which the official later acknowledged had no basis in fact.

Douša filed a lawsuit accusing DHS of unjust surveillance and retaliation, and in March 2023 a federal judge ruled in her favor. Judge Todd Robinson agreed that DHS had violated Douša's right to freedom of religious expression by instructing Mexican authorities to detain her.

Both Douša and the United Church of Christ, which ordained her, argued that her actions were based in her religious commitments. Douša previously stated, "To reject a migrant is to cast away God's angels, which I am unwilling to do."

Shifts in the legal landscape

This is not the first time religious leaders or groups providing pastoral and humanitarian care to migrants have come under scrutiny.

One famous example is the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, an informal network of up to 500 churches whose members provided safe haven to undocumented asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America.

Several members of the movement were convicted of conspiring to smuggle immigrants into the U.S. They appealed, arguing that their work was inspired by their religious convictions and that the government was violating their First Amendment rights. Yet their claims were largely unsuccessful.

Over the past few decades, however, religious freedom claims have often found more favor in U.S. courts.

In part, this is because of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has made it easier for people and institutions to claim religiously based exemptions from generally applicable laws. One of the best-known examples is the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court, citing the owners' religious convictions, exempted the national chain of crafts stores from providing employee health insurance that included contraception coverage.

Help on the ground

This shift has opened new lines of defense for religious actors, including humanitarian groups.

No More Deaths is a nonprofit associated with a Unitarian Universalist church in Tucson, Arizona. Members leave supplies along desert routes traveled by migrants, provide first aid and occasionally offer services such as temporary shelter to migrants who are suffering from exposure.

In 2018, volunteers were charged with littering, driving on protected lands and, in one case, harboring undocumented immigrants.

Four volunteers were initially convicted, but their charges were dismissed after they argued that they were compelled by religious convictions and that the government had violated their freedom of religious expression. The appeals court judge cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as well as the Hobby Lobby case in holding that the volunteers were protected under U.S. law.

A more recent dustup between a religious humanitarian organization and government officials occurred in December 2022. A group of Republicans in Congress sent a letter to Catholic Charities, a humanitarian nonprofit affiliated with the church that provides food, shelter and bathing facilities on both sides of the border.

In U.S. border cities, the organization also provides transportation from shelters to bus stops and money exchanges. The representatives' letter cited this work as a reason to suspect Catholic Charities of encouraging illegal border crossings and required staff to preserve records of their work.

The organization argued that the charges were " both fallacious and factually inaccurate." Caring for people in need, "including vulnerable people on the move," leaders wrote, "is a part of the fabric of the global Catholic Church and is mandated by the gospel."

Yet another sticking point between religious groups and immigration law has emerged in Florida in recent weeks. A bill recently signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis was modified after religious groups protested against its proposed criminal penalties for knowingly transporting or concealing an undocumented immigrant. Religious leaders argued that this would violate their religious freedom by preventing them from providing rides to religious services or from finding aid for people in need.

National vs. universal mandates

It is not surprising that these conflicts keep happening, considering the U.S. government's and religious organizations' different motivations around migration.

One main driver for politicians is simply that many voters are nervous about newcomers, especially if they have different cultural, religious or racial backgrounds. The nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute has found that while 55% of Americans think immigrants strengthen American society, 40% believe a growing number of newcomers "threatens traditional American customs and values." In the past few years, multiple Republican politicians have even embraced some version of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory. Once limited to extremist and antisemitic groups, replacement theory alleges that immigrants are either replacing native-born American citizens or are intentionally being used to facilitate electoral and social change.

Political scientist Seyla Benhabib has argued that another reason some leaders focus on border policies is that national sovereignty has been weakened in a globalizing world. Multinational corporations, for example, are sometimes influential enough to shape government policies, such as lobbying for weaker labor laws and environmental protections.

But whereas sovereignty and citizens are priorities for governments, many religious traditions teach adherents to care for people regardless of what community they belong to. Religious thinkers do argue over whether their traditions encourage greater attention to people in their own communities. Still, when it comes to people's most basic survival needs, most emphasize that care should know no borders.

For the foreseeable future, these priorities will continue to clash - and some religious people may push back by claiming a First Amendment right to freedom of religious expression.

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When faith says to help migrants - and the law says don't

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As governments crack down at their borders, religious groups' teachings to help the stranger remain unchanged.

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A Vox article, which argues that to understand modern politics, you have to understand fandom. 

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A Vox article, which argues that to understand modern politics, you have to understand fandom. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE does the article justify the assertion that modern politics resembles ‘fandom’? Divide the class into groups to explore three ways in which fandom and politics converge: 1) Dependence on big, shared narratives; 2) Emotions shaping reality; 3) Projecting our own symbols onto celebrities. Swap findings with the other groups when you have finished. To wrap up: How can - and should - we make politics more about rational consideration than emotional reaction?

KEY TERMS Fandom, Disinformation and zealotry, Emotional attachment, Shared story, Higher Moral purpose, Truth, Objective version of reality, Collectively created construct, Idolatry

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If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandom

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You don’t just vote for Trump. You stan him.

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A long Guardian article, looking at the work of Sefton Delmer, who successfully countered Nazi disinformation, and found ways of breaking into other people’s ‘echo chambers’. 

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A long Guardian article, looking at the work of Sefton Delmer, who successfully countered Nazi disinformation, and found ways of breaking into other people’s ‘echo chambers’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who was Sefton Delmer, and why does his work resonate with those looking to counter disinformation today? How did his approach differ from anti-propaganda information produced by organizations such as the BBC? How did he change his tactics with the station, Soldatensender Calais? What does the article mean when it says, “The real antidote to [disinformation] is not plying them with facts. It’s helping to fix the underlying lack of agency”? To wrap up: “You can’t shove “the truth” down people’s throats if they don’t want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.” How does the work of Sefton Delmer help us to learn how to do that?

KEY TERMS Disinformation, Alternative reality, Truth, Roles, Grievance narratives, Social tribe, Values

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Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were "rigged". Millions are sure that the "deep state" is plotting to import immigrants to vote against "real Americans" in the future. Meanwhile in Russia, the majority of people claim that the Kremlin is the innocent party in its brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Ukrainians call their relatives in Russia to tell them about the atrocities, all too often they hear their own kin parrot the Kremlin's propaganda lines: the atrocities are faked, or false flags, or necessary in order to impose Russia's greatness.

Across the world we see the growth of propaganda that promotes an alternative reality where black is white and white is black, and where truth is cast away in favour of a sense of superiority and ever more murderous paranoia. How can we defeat it? It's easy to despair when fact checking is rejected by the millions who don't want to hear the truth in the first place; when worthy journalism that preaches the virtues of "democracy" crumples in the face of suspicion, seeded purposefully for decades, that the media are actually "enemies of the people".

We are not, however, the first generation to confront the challenge of authoritarian propaganda. And as I looked for past experiences to inform our own, I discovered a British second world war media operation that managed to engage huge audiences who had been loyal to the Nazis and undermine their faith in Hitler's regime. If we think reaching people in "echo chambers" today is tough, think about how hard it was to persuade Germans to trust the people who were literally trying to kill them.

A mural of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA

This campaign was led by Sefton Delmer, who as head of special operations for the Political Warfare Executive, created dozens of radio stations, newspapers leaflets and rumours, all intended to break the spell cast by Hitler's propaganda by fair means or foul. He employed stars from the German cabaret scene, soldiers, surrealist artists, psychiatrists, forgers, spies and dissidents from across occupied Europe. Ian Fleming and Muriel Spark lent their talents to Delmer's operations. According to declassified UK government files, which have been unearthed and organised by the historian and archivist Lee Richards, around 40% of German soldiers tuned into Delmer's stations. An SS Obergruppenführer from Munich complained that Delmer's stations were among the top three in the city and were causing complete havoc. Goebbels was dismayed by how effective they were.

Delmer's interest, however, went beyond the uniquely nasty realm of nazism. He saw the same patterns at play throughout Germany in the 20th century as well as in Britain during the first world war. And his wartime work has many lessons for us today.

Propaganda is successful when it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate

The son of an Australian literature professor at Berlin University, Delmer grew up in Germany and spoke the language fluently. Australia was a dominion of the British Empire at the time, and Delmer was seen, and wanted to see himself, as British. He was 10 years old when the first world war broke out, and was bullied for being an enemy schoolchild. When he came to England in 1917, he was bullied for seeming too German, a consequence of what he described as "our British way of working up to a real crescendo of hate and fury towards the end of the war". He would learn to play the perfect English schoolboy. But reading his memoirs I felt this bicultural childhood left him with the sense that all social roles are exactly that: roles that are there to be performed. Propaganda is successful when it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate. It also left him with an awareness of how deeply we all need to belong to a group - Delmer had found it painful to be an outsider, seen as not properly British. Until the end of his life he would remain an imperial nostalgist, performing an almost caricatured version of the Britishness he longed to be part of as a child.

It was the performative aspect of propaganda, and the simultaneous need to belong, that struck him when he observed Hitler's success. In the 1920s, Delmer became a star reporter for the Daily Express in Berlin. He gained behind-the-scenes access on Hitler's election flights around Germany, where adoring crowds saluted the führer. Hitler gave people the sense of being part of a huge mass, a Volk, which appealed to many after the confusing changes of the early 20th century, when the old social order had been upended. He also gave people roles to play when the old ones had vanished: in the confusing cabaret of Weimar Germany, where identities were in flux, you knew who you were when you became a Nazi party member or an SS man. These roles were emotionally satisfying: they allowed people to submit to a strong leader, and feel strong and superior through him; they also allowed them to feel the victim, which in turn legitimised anger and cruelty to others. Some psychoanalysts who observed the rallies believed these grievance narratives gave people the chance to blame external forces for all the things they didn't like about themselves. Orators like Hitler make us feel we can crush the voice inside of us that tells us we are not good enough, by projecting it on to others.

Sefton Delmer broadcasts to Germany in 1941. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

Today's propagandists play on the same needs. In a time of rapid economic, social and technological change it can be comforting to be part of a large, angry crowd. Online conspiracy theory communities are particularly effective at pulling together a sense of being part of a group with a secret knowledge and mission. Such media also give people a role to play in a confusing world: as a Proud Boy or a "patriot" storming the Capitol. Social media, where you are encouraged to label who you are, only exacerbates this performance. Meanwhile the allure of " strongmen " has never gone away. Whether you buy into the psychoanalytic theories, the grievance narratives work - from Trump's crusade to Make America Great Again to Putin promising to get Russia back off its knees.

When the second world war was declared, Delmer was dismayed by Britain's efforts to counter Nazi propaganda. He felt that the BBC German Service was simply preaching to converted anti-Nazis. So was the other German language station the British ran, the Station of the European Revolution, which still held out hope for a democratic uprising in Germany. Much like media across the world today, which see themselves as supporting democracy and liberal values, these stations were trapped in what we sometimes label an echo chamber of like-minded people.

Delmer wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by pushing Nazi propaganda 'one step further into the ridiculous'

Delmer wanted to break through and engage audiences that had come under the sway of the Nazis, and find the cracks that split them from the party. His first effort claimed to be a pirate radio station, hosted by a foul-mouthed German officer known simply as Der Chef. This racist patriot spewed stories about the scurrilous activities of Nazi officials, ranting about their sadomasochistic orgies. This pornography helped lure in listeners and broke taboos about insulting Nazi officials. In a more subtle way, it dramatised and mocked how nazism tapped into the psychological allure of submission and domination.

Rather than produce moral and "rational" media, Delmer wanted to undermine the Nazi's monopoly over people's strongest, most violent urges. Then he turned the propaganda back on to the Nazis: "Our stories were peopled with Burgomasters, District Leaders, Local group leaders," he explained. "We spread over them a slime of obloquy as foul as that which they themselves had spread over the Jews."

Delmer's aim was not to replace one violent movement with another. Instead, he wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by, as he explained to the king when he presented his work, pushing Nazi propaganda "one step further into the ridiculous". This wasn't quite satire - people were meant to believe Der Chef was a genuine soldier hiding somewhere inside German-held territory. And satire doesn't always do much to undermine the hold a leader has on his followers: satirists who mock Trump or Brexit might make their own audiences feel good but don't necessarily reach the other side.

Delmer understood the need to engage people around their own interests rather than what you might like them to care about, and this is a lesson Ukrainian info warriors have been learning in their war with Russia. Ukraine is full of advertisers and hackers, activists and journalists all trying to reach Russian audiences.

They buy ads on Russian pornography sites and bootleg movie portals or use cold calling software more familiar from marketing campaigns. Early on they found that "moral" content didn't take off. When they made mass telephone calls to Russians, they found that some 80% would hang up during the first 20 seconds if the calls were about war crimes, but only 30% hung up when the call focused on their personal interests, such as a special tax they had to pay to support Russia's newly occupied lands.

But though Delmer's first station was a success, with some sources in Europe even claiming it was the most listened-to station in Germany, it didn't take long for the Nazis to work out that it was the British who were behind it. They began calling it out publicly, using it as an example of how dastardly the British propaganda was. Indeed, here is one (of many) negative lessons from Delmer's work. Then, as now, creating "sock puppet" media - media that pretend to be one thing but are actually another - can backfire.

People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories when they don't feel they have any agency or influence over their lives

As he expanded his war work, Delmer changed tactics. When he launched his most ambitious station, the Soldatensender Calais, it was still dressed up as if it were a native German military station, combining broadcasts of speeches by Nazi leaders with music and the latest news and gossip from the front that demonstrated all the lies and inequalities soldiers faced. But the aim was no longer to dupe the listener into believing this was a Nazi station - this time the audience was meant to be in on the act. As Peter Wykeham, a colleague of Delmer's, explained, this station would "(i) afford our German customers an excuse if caught listening, (ii) enable them to justify this dubious activity to themselves". Yet even though German listeners knew perfectly well the British were behind the station, they listened to it and trusted it. Often today we lament that people only trust the media that represent their social tribe. So how did Delmer pull it off?

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Delmer used every research tool at his disposal to understand his audience's world. Partisan groups in France provided the latest scores from military football matches and information on the cars officers drove. Secret microphones installed in PoW camps picked up on the soldiers' latest slang and complaints about their higher-ups. A special storage space had to be constructed for the volumes of notes held by Delmer's archivist, the former leader of the Social Democrats in the Saar region, Max Braun. Delmer's team had early knowledge of when the RAF would strike a German town so they could warn soldiers if the street their loved ones lived on had been hit and remind them of their right to take leave and help relatives caught under bombardment.

Trump supporters in Washington, following the 2020 US presidential election ... 'Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were "rigged".' Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA

Today it is so much easier to understand what people care about, even in closed societies. You can look at open-source research into corrupt procurement by local government, do sentiment analysis of social media, or use secure messaging apps that allow you to talk directly to people even in the most dangerous areas. The key is always to understand people's conditions, and be useful to them. Delmer never talked down or lectured - instead he understood the gripes of the soldiers and made them feel part of a community that looked after their interests better than the Nazis.

But just as important as what was broadcast was the experience of tuning in. Here was a radio programme pretending to be Nazi, which understood that its listeners knew that it wasn't, and whose listeners tuned in because they needed the emotional and physical safety of play acting as if they thought it might be Nazi after all. If the principle of Goebbels' propaganda was to try to entrance you, to dissolve you into the loud, angry crowd, then here was media that required you to make a series of autonomous, conscious steps to engage. Delmer's other media, such as his leaflets to help you feign illness and defect from the front, were also designed for people to take control and be more active. He encouraged people to invent roles for themselves rather than play the ones forced on them by Nazi propaganda.

How people think and act can be just as important as what they think when undermining the most malign propaganda. People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories, for example, when they don't feel they have any agency or influence over their lives and rely on conspiracies to explain the world. Many are drawn to "strongmen" when they feel they can't take back control over their lives. The real antidote to this is not plying them with facts. It's helping to fix the underlying lack of agency.

So what can we draw from the strange, contradictory experience of Delmer's deeds and misdeeds? Dictators and propagandists inside democracies use hate-spreading troll farms and conspiracy-spewing cable news; target audiences according to their deepest grievances and encourage cruelty. To compete we need to develop a new generation of democratic media with the same focus, but with different values. This needs to be done at scale.

First, such media has to match the emotional power of authoritarians. Counter-propagandists need their own visceral dramas, YouTubers and the whole spectrum of today's channels.

They don't need to hide their provenance like Der Chef, though they may have to give people the necessary "cover" to watch safely if in a dangerous dictatorship. But they do need to delve into the operating theatre of our darkest desires. Think of the difference between the cult leader and the therapist. Both dig into people's unspoken fears and needs. The cult leader, like the authoritarian propagandist, uses that insight to make people dependent on their power. The therapist helps them to become more empowered and self-aware.

Second, we need to be much more attuned to the needs of audiences - think of media less as dispensing information and more as a social service. We are, by the looks of it, going to be in a long struggle with Russia. Now is the time to start investing in media that engage the parts of society that are critical to their war effort: workers in munitions factories or, most obviously, soldiers. It's much easier than in Delmer's time to obtain evidence of what they care about. Last month there was, for example, a large leak of documents from Russia's military that showed how the leadership lies about losses on the front. The aim is not to make these people, who are often involved in war crimes, "good" - it's to help win the war by getting them to disobey their orders.

Third, such media need to nurture a sense of community, especially in polarised democracies where there is still a chance of displacing malign propaganda before it reaches total dominance, and where there are audiences up for grabs. Instead of experiencing power through a strongman, this community needs to empower people to act for themselves. There are many small initiatives that already pioneer this. Hearken, for example, is an online platform where users can help media choose which topics they should focus on, taking power away from aloof editors and grounding it in local needs. vTaiwan is another platform whose algorithm helps people find solutions to polarising issues by identifying common ground on which to build policies. Such examples are tiny and experimental, and need to be scaled massively.

Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. But the most fundamental one is related to his sense that all social roles are somehow performed. We have a choice. We can either play the role prescribed by propagandists - which makes us dependent on them. Or we can invent media that welcome people into a relationship where they become active players.

You can't shove "the truth" down people's throats if they don't want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler will be published by Faber on 7 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The man who tricked Nazi Germany: lessons from the past on how to beat disinformation

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The story of the British man who took on Hitler's information machine offers valuable insights into the fight against the rise of authoritarianism

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An NPR article, which looks critically at the way everyone is vocally celebrating MLK day - even those who would have been naturally opposed to his ideas. 

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An NPR article, which looks critically at the way everyone is vocally celebrating MLK day - even those who would have been naturally opposed to his ideas. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do we know that people’s interpretations of historical figure’s legacies are objective and accurate?

KEY TERMS Trojan horse, Manipulate and defang, Interpretation

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This article first appeared in Code Switch's "Up All Night" newsletter, about the race-related thoughts, ideas, and news items that our team is losing sleep over. For first access every Friday, sign up here.
One cold January evening about 10 years ago, I was walking in Philadelphia, when a stranger called out to me from across the narrow street. "Hey," he said, "Can I get your number?" I smiled politely and kept walking, but he gave it one more shot. "C'mon - it's what Dr. King would've wanted!" And that is how I met the love of my life.

Just kidding. I picked up my pace and never saw that man again.

That brief, ill-fated attempt at game was one of the more bizarre invocations of Martin Luther King Jr. that I've experienced. But it was, unfortunately, by no means the most egregious.

For decades, everyone and their mother has tried to get a piece of that sweet, sweet MLK Pie, from car companies to banks to pop stars to politicians ( no matter their actual politics). And don't forget about the deals! A recent article in Forbes probably put it best: "MLK Day is unequivocally about celebrating the life and legacy of civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," they wrote (emphasis mine). But also, the article went on, "Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day and even Martin Luther King Jr. Day typically bring about some great discounts." (Cue the swelling applause.)

And look, of course those examples seem cringey. But Hajar Yazdiha, the author of a new book about the struggle over King's memory, argues that it's worse than that - that Dr. King's legacy has been used quite intentionally as a "Trojan horse for anti-civil rights causes." For instance, at a news conference in 2021, numerous Republican lawmakers invoked King's "I Have a Dream" speech while arguing for bans on teaching Critical Race Theory in schools.

Those moves are from a very old playbook, Yazdiha told us on this week's episode of the Code Switch podcast. Take Ronald Reagan. As president, he publicly helped instate Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday. But Yazdiha says that in private letters, Reagan assured his friends that he was "really going to drive home throughout his presidency the story that Dr. King's dream of this colorblind nation has been realized and so now racism is...over and we can move on." That play - of invoking a radical figure only to manipulate and defang their teachings - has proved incredibly enduring, and often incredibly effective.

What keeps you up all night? Let us know below!
But it's worth remembering that despite his contemporaneous supporters, Dr. King was considered a huge threat during his lifetime, and was incredibly unpopular among the mainstream. And that's no coincidence. Part of the civil rights movement's success was due to its disruptive nature: massive boycotts, marches, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience that put powerful peoples' time, money, and good names in jeopardy.

So while it's all well and good to celebrate a hero from a bygone era now that he's no longer able to disagree with any particular interpretation of his legacy, maybe it's more important to be looking at the present. Because the real inheritors of King's legacy today - and of the civil rights movement more broadly - are likely acting in ways that make a lot of people pretty uncomfortable.

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Everywhere you look, people are vocally celebrating MLK Day. But many are cherry-picking which parts of his legacy to recall, and which will be conveniently relegated to the dustbins of history.

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A Conversation article, exploring the way in which disinformation may disrupt democratic elections around the world in 2024, and whether it’s possible to counter its effect. 

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A Conversation article, exploring the way in which disinformation may disrupt democratic elections around the world in 2024, and whether it’s possible to counter its effect. 

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With over half the world's population heading to the polls in 2024, disinformation season is upon us - and the warnings are dire. The World Economic Forum declared misinformation a top societal threat over the next two years and major news organisations caution that disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracies worldwide.

Yet, some scholars and pundits have questioned whether disinformation can really sway election outcomes. Others think concern over disinformation is just a moral panic or merely a symptom rather than the cause of our societal ills. Pollster Nate Silver even thinks that misinformation " isn't a coherent concept ".

But we argue the evidence tells a different story.

A 2023 study showed that the vast majority of academic experts are in agreement about how to define misinformation (namely as false and misleading content) and what this looks like (for example lies, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience). Although the study didn't cover disinformation, such experts generally agree that this can be defined as intentional misinformation.

A recent paper clarified that misinformation can both be a symptom and the disease. In 2022, nearly 70% of Republicans still endorsed the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 US presidential election was "stolen" from Donald Trump. If Trump had never floated this theory, how would millions of people have possibly acquired these beliefs?

Moreover, although it is clear that people do not always act on dangerous beliefs, the January 6 US Capitol riots, incited by false claims, serve as an important reminder that a misinformed crowd can disrupt and undermine democracy.

Given that nearly 25% of elections are decided by a margin of under 3%, mis- and disinformation can have important influence. One study found that among previous Barack Obama voters who did not buy into any fake news about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, 89% voted for Clinton. By contrast, among prior Obama voters who believed at least two fake headlines about Clinton, only 17% voted for her.

While this doesn't necessarily prove that the misinformation caused the voting behaviour, we do know that millions of black voters were targeted with misleading ads discrediting Clinton in key swing states ahead of the election.

Research has shown that such micro-targeting of specific audiences based on variables such as their personality not only influences decision-making but also impacts voting intentions. A recent paper illustrated how large language models can be deployed to craft micro-targeted ads at scale, estimating that for every 100,000 individuals targeted, at least several thousand can be persuaded.

We also know that not only are people bad at discerning deepfakes (AI generated images of fake events) from genuine content, studies find that deepfakes do influence political attitudes among a small target group.

There are more indirect consequences of disinformation too, such as eroding public trust and participation in elections.

Other than hiding under our beds and worrying, what can we do to protect ourselves?

The power of prebunking

Many efforts have focused on fact-checking and debunking false beliefs. In contrast, "prebunking" is a new way to prevent false beliefs from forming in the first place. Such "inoculation" involves warning people not to fall for a false narrative or propaganda tactic, together with an explanation as to why.

Misinforming rhetoric has clear markers, such as scapegoating or use of false dichotomies (there are many others), that people can learn to identify. Like a medical vaccine, the prebunk exposes the recipient to a "weakened dose" of the infectious agent (the disinformation) and refutes it in a way that confers protection.

For example, we created an online game for the Department of Homeland Security to empower Americans to spot foreign influence techniques during the 2020 presidential election. The weakened dose? Pineapple pizza.

How could pineapple pizza possibly be the way to tackle misinformation? It shows how bad-faith actors can take an innocuous issue such as whether or not to put pineapple on pizza, and use this to try to start a culture war. They might claim it's offensive to Italians or urge Americans not to let anybody restrict their pizza-topping freedom.

They can then buy bots to amplify the issue on both sides, disrupt debate - and sow chaos. Our results showed that people improved in their ability to recognise these tactics after playing our inoculation game.

In 2020, Twitter identified false election tropes as potential "vectors of misinformation" and sent out prebunks to millions of US users warning them of fraudulent claims, such as that voting by mail is not safe.

These prebunks armed people with a fact - that experts agree that voting by mail is reliable - and it worked insofar as the prebunks inspired confidence in the election process and motivated users to seek out more factual information. Other social media companies, such as Google and Meta have followed suit across a range of issues.

A new paper tested inoculation against false claims about the election process in the US and Brazil. Not only did it found that prebunking worked better than traditional debunking, but that the inoculation improved discernment between true and false claims, effectively reduced election fraud beliefs and improved confidence in the integrity of the upcoming 2024 elections.

In short, inoculation is a free speech-empowering intervention that can work on a global scale. When Russia was looking for a pretext to invade Ukraine, US president Joe Biden used this approach to " inoculate " the world against Putin's plan to stage and film a fabricated Ukrainian atrocity, complete with actors, a script and a movie crew. Biden declassified the intelligence and exposed the plot.

In effect, he warned the world not to fall for fake videos with actors pretending to be Ukrainian soldiers on Russian soil. Forewarned, the international community was unlikely to fall for it. Russia found another pretext to invade, of course, but the point remains: forewarned is forearmed.

But we need not rely on government or tech firms to build mental immunity. We can all learn how to spot misinformation by studying the markers accompanying misleading rhetoric.

Remember that polio was a highly infectious disease that was eradicated through vaccination and herd immunity. Our challenge now is to build herd immunity to the tricks of disinformers and propagandists.

The future of our democracy may depend on it.

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Disinformation threatens global elections - here's how to fight back

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Scientists estimate that for every 100,000 people targeted with specific political ads, several thousand can be persuaded.

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A History Today article, taking a broad look at the debate surrounding statues that celebrate controversial characters from the past. 

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A History Today article, taking a broad look at the debate surrounding statues that celebrate controversial characters from the past. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, think about what purpose statues serve. Going on from here, how has this purpose changed over time? Focus on the quote in the last paragraph: “On the one hand are those who regard them as embodying some essential and imperishable historical certainty. On the other are observers who are able – and willing – to look beyond a particular statue to a more complex and contestable past reality.” Which camp do you fall into? Also check out this Aeon article for further reference!

Key terms Purpose, Controversial, Statuomania, Political values

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What purpose do statues serve? This question came to the fore when former prime minister Theresa May announced plans in June 2019 for a memorial in London's Waterloo station commemorating the arrival to Britain in 1948 of the first of the Windrush generation.

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An FT article, arguing that our understanding of the term ‘civilization’ is deeply flawed - bringing with it big implications. 

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An FT article, arguing that our understanding of the term ‘civilization’ is deeply flawed - bringing with it big implications. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do those in power use the word ‘civilisation’ to help them consolidate their position? How did the Harvard academic Samuel P Huntington shape the way we use the term? Why does the author argue that they are an invented “modern confection”? How does viewing the world as being interconnected refute ‘civilisational thinking’? To wrap up: “There has never been a pure western culture that is now under threat of pollution. No single people is an island, unless they’ve been there for a very long time and haven’t invented boats.” How does this help us to understand history more effectively, and avoid being misled by those with an agenda?

KEY TERMS Under attack, Universal good, Moral dimension, Justify, Cultural superiority, Connectivity

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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What the world gets wrong about 'civilisation'

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Politicians everywhere are making appeals to ancient history - but their thinking is based on a myth

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A Sky News report, discussing New York mayor Eric Adams’s use of audio deep fakes to make promotional calls in languages he doesn’t speak. 

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A Sky News report, discussing New York mayor Eric Adams’s use of audio deep fakes to make promotional calls in languages he doesn’t speak. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How has mayor Eric Adams been using AI tools to communicate with residents? Why have some people called this ‘unethical’ and ‘Orwellian’? What is your position on the story - is his use of AI justified? To wrap up: Where is the line between AI-usage that facilitates our ability to communicate with others, and AI-usage that misleads us when we communicate with others?

KEY TERMS  Robocalls, Unethical, Orwellian

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New York's mayor has admitted using audio deepfakes to call residents in languages he doesn't speak.

Eric Adams has been heard speaking Spanish and Mandarin thanks to the technology, which he said was a way to reach more people.

Speaking at a news briefing (in English), the Democrat said the "robocalls" were used to promote local events like recruitment fairs and concerts.

The self-described "techie" insisted he had enjoyed positive feedback from residents, saying some he'd spoken to were "excited" to hear their mayor in their own language.

"We are becoming more welcoming by using technology to speak a multitude of languages," he added.

"To all, all I can say is ni hao (Mandarin for hello)," is how he cheekily signed off the conference, having been asked whether the phone calls were potentially misleading people.

Local news outlet The City reports more than four million people have been reached by the calls so far, including thousands in Spanish and hundreds in Yiddish, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

They are generated using voice tech firm ElevenLabs, which was left embarrassed earlier this year when its software was used to generate celebrity voices reading inappropriate statements.

Spotify is experimenting with similar tools to translate podcasts into other languages.
'Deeply unethical'
Following the news conference, the mayor was criticised by campaigners who described the calls as "unethical", as they don't include any clarification that the voice is artificially generated.

Albert Fox Cahn, from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said it was a "creepy vanity project".

"The mayor is making deep fakes of himself," he said.

"This is deeply unethical, especially on the taxpayer's dime. Using AI to convince New Yorkers that he speaks languages that he doesn't is deeply Orwellian."
Read more:
Twelve AI problems that 'must be addressed'
Tom Hanks warns fans not to fall for deepfake ad
1:51
Mayor won't 'run away' from AI despite risks
The potential threat posed to democracy by the technology has recently been underlined by fake clips targeting UK Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

Mr Adams acknowledged concerns around such generative AI, including those used to create images and videos, but said he would not be "running away" from the tools.

He also used the news briefing to tout a new chatbot service to help small business owners.

It's powered by Microsoft technology with an interface similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and allows users to ask questions about applying for local programmes and advice on how to run a company.

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New York's mayor uses audio deepfakes to call residents in languages he doesn't speak

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Eric Adams doesn't speak Spanish or Mandarin, but left some locals wondering if he was actually an expert linguist after a series of promotional calls.

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A Vox article, considering the way in which the word ‘brunch’ has become a politicized term.

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A Vox article, considering the way in which the word ‘brunch’ has become a politicized term.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do words become politicized?

Key terms Meme, Insular mindset

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The politics of “going back to brunch” after a Biden win

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The meal is a meme used to mock centrist Democrats’ complacency and political indifference.

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A Conversation article*, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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A Conversation article*, contending that Socrates’s approach to wisdom can help reduce the negative effects of political polarization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is humility the most essential step in the search for truth?

KEY TERMS Polarized deadlock, Epistemic humility, Dangerous, Power holders, Certainty, Absolute truth, Open to being wrong

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.

But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone's conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure - why everything seems so irreparably wrong.

As religion and philosophy scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of "epistemic humility," or intellectual humility - that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one's own. In other words, Americans have stopped listening.

So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people's fear of being mistaken, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong.

But we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. We believe epistemic humility presents something of a twofold danger that makes being humble frightening - and has, ever since Socrates first put it at the heart of Western philosophy.

Knowing you don't know

If your best friend told you that you were the wisest of all human beings, perhaps you would be inclined to smile in agreement and take the dear friend for a beer. But when the ancient Athenian Socrates was delivered this news, he responded with sincere and utter disbelief - even though his friend had confirmed it with the Delphic oracle, the fortune-telling authority of the ancient world.

This nascent humility - "No, get out of here, I'm definitely not the wisest" - helped spark what became arguably the greatest philosophical life of all time. Despite relative old age, Socrates immediately embarked on a journey to find someone wiser than himself and spent many days seeking out the sages of the ancient world, a quest Plato recounts in his " Apology of Socrates."

The problem? He discovered that the sages thought they knew more than they actually did. Eventually, Socrates concluded that he himself was, in fact, the wisest of all men, because at least he "knew that he didn't know."

This is not to say that Socrates knew nothing: He demonstrates time and again that he knows a lot and routinely demonstrated good judgment. Rather, he acknowledged there were definite limitations to the knowledge he could claim.

This is the birth of "epistemic humility" in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one's blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.

Provoking the powerful

But this mindset can feel dangerous to other people - especially if they feel absolutely certain in their convictions.

In ancient Athens, as much as in the U.S. today, being perceived as right translated into money and power. The city-state's culture was dominated by the Sophists, who taught rhetoric to nobles and politicians, and the Poets, ancient playwrights. Greek theater and epic poetry were closely related to religion, and their creators were treated as mouthpieces for aesthetic and moral truth.

What's more, theater and poetry were also major moneymakers, which motivated artists to adopt a mentality of "fail fast, fail better," with an eye to eventually proving correct and getting paid.

By critically interrogating the idols and polarized views of his culture, Socrates threatened the power holders of his city. A constantly questioning figure is a direct threat to individuals who spend their lives defending unquestioned belief - whether it's belief in themselves, their superiors or their gods.

Take Euthyphro, for example, one of Socrates' principal interlocutors. Euthyphro is so sure that he knows the difference between right and wrong that he is bringing his own father to trial. Socrates quickly disabuses him of his certainty, famously debating him about the true meaning of piety.

Or take Meletus, the man who eventually brought Socrates to trial on accusations of corrupting youth. In Plato's account of the trial, it takes Socrates no time to show this "good patriot," as Meletus calls himself, that he does not understand what patriotism truly means. Without any pretensions to knowing the absolute truth, Socrates is able to shed light on the underlying assumptions around him.

It's frustrating to read the Platonic dialogues, the works of philosophy that recount Socrates' life and teaching, in part because Socrates rarely claims the final word on any subject. In short, he gives more questions than answers. But what remains constant is his openness to uncertainty that keeps his inquiry on the move, pushing his inquiries further and deeper.

Paying the price

The second danger of epistemic humility is now probably in view. It's the danger that Socrates faced when he was brought to trial for corrupting Athens' youth - the danger to the humble skeptics themselves.

He is brought up on two very serious charges. The first was an accusation that he taught students to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger - which is actually what the Sophists did, not Socrates. The second was that he had invented new gods - again, he didn't do that; poets and playwrights did.

What was he really guilty of? Perhaps only this: Socrates criticized the arrogant self-assertion of his culture's influencers, and they brought him to trial, which concluded in his death sentence.

Socrates taught that being humble about one's own views was a necessary step in searching for truth - perhaps the most essential one. That was and perhaps still is a revolutionary view, because it forces us to challenge preconceived ideas about what we believe, what we worship and where we tap meaning. He placed himself in the middle of Athenians' sharply polarized debates about what truth and goodness were, and he was the one who got hit.

"Humility like darkness," wrote American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, " reveals the heavenly lights." Put another way, humility about the verity, accuracy and wisdom of one's ideas can reveal the fact that others have understandable reasons for thinking as they do - as long as you try to see the world as they are seeing it. In contrast, arrogance tends to extinguish the "heavenly light" about what we still don't fully understand.

Being humble about one's position in the world is not an invitation for a post-truth, anything-goes opinion free-for-all. Truth - the idea of truth - matters. And we can pursue it together, if we are always open to being wrong.

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What Socrates' 'know nothing' wisdom can teach a polarized America

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Athens was deeply polarized over big-picture questions, and Socrates was never hesitant to question both sides' assumptions - or his own.

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A Conversation article, analyzing how people from both sides of the political spectrum only detect bias when it supports the opposing party. 

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A Conversation article, analyzing how people from both sides of the political spectrum only detect bias when it supports the opposing party. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does it say about the way Democrats and Republicans perceive bias?  Why is this the case? How does rethinking the way we define ‘the media’ help us to understand bias? What is the significance of the fact that “we are the audience whose attention media outlets want to attract”? Overall, what responsibilities do we have in order to ensure the media provides us with accurate and informative information about what really matters?

Key terms Brainwash, Bias, Perspective, Objective journalism, Audiences, Attention

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Charges of media bias - that "the media" are trying to brainwash Americans by feeding the public only one side of every issue - have become as common as campaign ads in the run-up to the midterm elections.

As a political scientist who has examined media coverage of the Trump presidency and campaigns, I can say that this is what social science research tells us about media bias.

First, media bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Communications scholars have found that if you ask people in any community, using scientific polling methods, whether their local media are biased, you'll find that about half say yes. But of that half, typically a little more than a quarter say that their local media are biased against Republicans, and a little less than a quarter say the same local media are biased against Democrats.

Research shows that Republicans and Democrats spot bias only in articles that clearly favor the other party. If an article tilts in favor of their own party, they tend to see it as unbiased.

Many people, then, define "bias" as "anything that doesn't agree with me." It's not hard to see why.

'Media' is a plural word

American party politics has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Republicans have become more consistently conservative, and Democrats have become more consistently liberal to moderate.

As the lines have been drawn more clearly, many people have developed hostile feelings toward the opposition party.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 45% of Republicans said the Democratic Party's policies are "so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being," and 41% of Democrats said the same about Republicans. A poll conducted in midyear 2022 by Pew showed that "72% of Republicans regard Democrats as more immoral, and 63% of Democrats say the same about Republicans."

Not surprisingly, media outlets have arisen to appeal primarily to people who share a conservative view, or people who share a liberal view.

That doesn't mean that "the media" are biased. There are hundreds of thousands of media outlets in the U.S. - newspapers, radio, network TV, cable TV, blogs, websites and social media. These news outlets don't all take the same perspective on any given issue.

If you want a very conservative news site, it is not hard to find one, and the same with a very liberal news site.

First Amendment rules

"The media," then, present a variety of different perspectives. That's the way a free press works.

The Constitution's First Amendment says Congress shall make no law limiting the freedom of the press. It doesn't say that Congress shall require all media sources to be "unbiased." Rather, it implies that as long as Congress does not systematically suppress any particular point of view, then the free press can do its job as one of the primary checks on a powerful government.

When the Constitution was written and for most of U.S. history, the major news sources - newspapers, for most of that time - were explicitly biased. Most were sponsored by a political party or a partisan individual.

The notion of objective journalism - that media must report both sides of every issue in every story - barely existed until the late 1800s. It reached full flower only in the few decades when broadcast television, limited to three major networks, was the primary source of political information.

Since that time, the media universe has expanded to include huge numbers of internet news sites, cable channels and social media posts. So if you feel that the media sources you're reading or watching are biased, you can read a wider variety of media sources.

If it bleeds, it leads

There is one form of actual media bias. Almost all media outlets need audiences in order to exist. Some can't survive financially without an audience; others want the prestige that comes from attracting a big audience.

Thus, the media define as "news" the kinds of stories that will attract an audience: those that feature drama, conflict, engaging pictures and immediacy. That's what most people find interesting. They don't want to read a story headlined "Dog bites man." They want "Man bites dog."

The problem is that a focus on such stories crowds out what we need to know to protect our democracy, such as: How do the workings of American institutions benefit some groups and disadvantage others? In what ways do our major systems - education, health care, national defense and others - function effectively or less effectively?

These analyses are vital to citizens - if we fail to protect our democracy, our lives will be changed forever - but they aren't always fun to read. So they get covered much less than celebrity scandals or murder cases - which, while compelling, don't really affect the ability to sustain a democratic system.

Writer Dave Barry demonstrated this media bias in favor of dramatic stories in a 1998 column.

He wrote, "Let's consider two headlines. FIRST HEADLINE: 'Federal Reserve Board Ponders Reversal of Postponement of Deferral of Policy Reconsideration.' SECOND HEADLINE: 'Federal Reserve Board Caught in Motel with Underage Sheep.' Be honest, now. Which of these two stories would you read?"

By focusing on the daily equivalent of the underage sheep, media can direct our attention away from the important systems that affect our lives. That isn't the media's fault; we are the audience whose attention media outlets want to attract.

But as long as we think of governance in terms of its entertainment value and media bias in terms of Republicans and Democrats, we'll continue to be less informed than we need to be. That's the real media bias.
This story is an updated version of an article that was originally published on Oct. 15, 2020.

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Republicans and Democrats see news bias only in stories that clearly favor the other party

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Many people define 'bias' as 'anything that doesn't agree with me.' But are the news media really biased?

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A Conversation article, looking at the problems associated with people thinking they know more about politics than they actually do. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the problems associated with people thinking they know more about politics than they actually do. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does ‘political overconfidence’ affect our ability to understand politics and human sciences?

Key terms Emotion-laden, Overconfidence, Defensive, Partisanship, Experts, Experimental treatments, Reality check, False claims, Humility

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Americans think they know a lot about politics – and it’s bad for democracy that they’re so often wrong in their confidence

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Many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do. That overconfidence can thwart democratic politics.

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A BBC article and video, looking at the way President Zelensky adapts his language and message according to the audience he is dealing with. 

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A BBC article and video, looking at the way President Zelensky adapts his language and message according to the audience he is dealing with. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How and why does he use ‘undiplomatic language’ to communicate with other world leaders and parliaments? What other means of communication does he employ other than words? How does he tailor his message, and the way the message is delivered, to fit his audience? How does his background help him to make an intimate connection with those listening to him?

Key terms Highly tailored, Visceral, Undiplomatic language, Perspective

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‘Shame on you’: How President Zelensky uses speeches to get what he needs

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In 10 parliaments over two weeks Ukraine’s leader has used shame and national trauma to set a global agenda.

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A Salon article, asking the question, ‘when does a political movement become a cult?’ 

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A Salon article, asking the question, ‘when does a political movement become a cult?’ 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What warning did George Washington issue after he had ceased to be the president - and why does the writer feel that he anticipated many modern-day problems in politics? What is the difference between normal partisanship and a political cult, and what examples are offered for the latter (hint - focus on the word ‘infallible’)? What are the consequences of people worshiping political figures, rather than holding them to account? Overall, how do we approach politics objectively, and how should we deal with those who refuse to do so?

Key terms Partisanship, Fanaticism, Cult-like devotion, Infallible, Mind-control, Narcissism

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When does a political movement become a cult?

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Numerous contemporary politicians have adherents who worship them like cult leaders. Where do you draw the line between cult and political partisanship?

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A New Statesman article, exploring how audiences hear two different stories when they watch the congressional hearings about the Capitol Hill riots. 

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A New Statesman article, exploring how audiences hear two different stories when they watch the congressional hearings about the Capitol Hill riots. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does this reveal about the difficulties of establishing a ‘true account’ of the events of January 6th 2020? What role has evidence played in both sides’ attempt to ‘control the narrative? “Facts are mere weapons in war over the narrative, and the question of what is true has become not empirical, but political” - what does this mean, and what are the implications? Finally, ask students: will opposing political beliefs always prevent us from reaching a consensus on the truth? Is there a solution to this problem?

Key terms Facts, Evidence, Bifurcation of reality, Truth

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Photo by Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images

If you haven't watched every minute so far of the box office bonanza that is the congressional hearing into the US Capitol riots of 6 January 2021, here's the short version: the election wasn't stolen, there was no systematic fraud, yet the then-president Donald Trump and some of his close associates persisted in making such claims, whipping his supporters into a frenzy that ended in a mob rampaging around the Congress building in Washington DC.

We know this. These hearings aren't about uncovering new facts that might change anyone's mind. They're about putting flesh on bones.

There was grim satisfaction in watching some of the most senior people on Team Trump give inside accounts of those crazy final days when it truly seemed like the wheels of American democracy might be coming off. There was William Barr, Trump's own attorney general, describing the 45th president as "detached from reality". He told the hearings how he informed his boss that claims about widespread voter fraud were "bulls**t". (Why, one couldn't help wondering, had he not said so publicly at the time?)

Ivanka Trump looked like a schoolchild who had been summoned to see the headteacher and had brought a gaggle of expensive lawyers with her. "I respect Attorney General Barr," she said, choosing her words carefully, "so I accepted what he was saying." And with that she appeared to wash her hands of the whole affair, and of her father, who has made the stolen election narrative the centrepiece in his incendiary shtick. The viewer was left imagining the Succession-like scenes around the dinner table at Mar-a-Lago at the next family get-together.
[See also: What the US Capitol riot hearing tell us about the slow decay of political norms]
The chair of the committee is Bennie Thompson, a Democratic congressman from Mississippi. But the real star of the show is Liz Cheney - the rebel Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who takes on the role of truth-seeking crusader against the "Big Lie". She does such a convincing job of skewering barefaced mendacity that one almost forgets about the key role her father, the former vice-president Dick Cheney, once played in constructing another grand fiction two decades ago. The "Big Lie" about Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaeda and his weapons of mass destruction programmes led America into a disastrous war in Iraq and cost hundreds of thousands of lives (while handsomely boosting the profits of Halliburton, a company Mr Cheney once led).

But never mind, memories are short in these fast-paced times. The committee hearings are structured like a blockbuster Netflix series: Friday's opening session was the hook - two hours of highly produced prime-time TV (the committee has hired a former ABC News executive to help them tell a more compelling tale) watched by 20 million people. The rest of the season will unfold over five subsequent episodes, leading to the inevitable denouement. The fact that the viewer knows how the story ends doesn't matter. This is compelling viewing.

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But there's a big problem: audience. Those who believe the whole "stolen election" narrative was a cynical attempt to subvert democracy and cling to power will get to the end of these hearings with even more facts in their armoury of belief. But the converse is also true. According to a poll published in January to coincide with the first anniversary of the attack on Capitol Hill, only 55 per cent of Americans believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected president of the US. In other words, almost half of all Americans either believe the election was stolen or that the electoral system is so broken that it simply cannot be trusted. Many of them will see in these slick televised hearings yet more evidence of the Deep State at work.

When I was investigating the role of the QAnon conspiracy theory in pushing the "stolen election" narrative, I came across Jack Posobiec, an alt-right social media personality and provocateur who worked to help get out the vote for Trump in 2016. He believed he and his colleagues had harnessed the power of social media to bypass the establishment gatekeepers of information and propel Trump into office. In his book, Citizens for Trump: The Inside Story of the People's Movement to Take Back America, he wrote, "Instead of a competition between rival campaigns, 2016 became a contest between rival realities." It was as if the electorate were watching two different movies, Posobiec wrote, with the same characters but different plot lines: "In one movie, Donald Trump was the monstrous villain, and in the other movie Hillary was the evil gorgon-queen."

This bifurcation of reality has only intensified in the five years since the book was written. The hearings on the Hill are part of a battle for control of the movie theatre. In this battle, facts no longer serve as signposts towards a common truth. Facts are mere weapons in war over the narrative, and the question of what is true has become not empirical, but political. In such an environment, the congressional hearings into what actually happened on 6 January are likely to entrench America's cultural and political chasm.
[See also: The 6 January attacks never ended]

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Facts are mere weapons in the war over US Capitol riots narrative

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The US congressional hearings are a blockbuster but a divided audience hears two different stories.

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A Conversation article, discussing how fact-checking won’t help people to discuss different viewpoints and ideas. 

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A Conversation article, discussing how fact-checking won’t help people to discuss different viewpoints and ideas. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How can focusing on the facts prevent us from overcoming the problems that divide society?

Key terms Shared sense of reality, Fact-checking, Scientific consensus, Mutual learning vs. being right, Disagreement checks

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Entering the new year, Americans are increasingly divided. They clash not only over differing opinions on COVID-19 risk or abortion, but basic facts like election counts and whether vaccines work. Surveying rising political antagonism, journalist George Packer recently wondered in The Atlantic, "Are we doomed?"

It is common to blame people who are intentionally distributing false information for these divisions. Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa says Facebook's "[bias] against facts" threatens democracy. Others lament losing the " shared sense of reality" and " common baseline of fact " thought to be a prerequisite for democracy.

Fact-checking, the rigorous independent verification of claims, is often presented as vital for fighting falsehoods. Elena Hernandez, a spokesperson for YouTube, states that "Fact checking is a crucial tool to help viewers make their own informed decisions" and "to address the spread of misinformation." Ariel Riera, head of Argentina-based fact-checking organization Chequeado, argues that fact checking and "quality information" are key in the fight against "the COVID-19 'infodemic.'"

Many people, including TV commentator John Oliver, are demanding that social media platforms better flag and combat the "flood of lies." And worried Twitter engineers sought to " pre-bunk " viral falsehoods before they arose during the United Nations' Glasgow climate summit in 2021.

As a social scientist who researches the role of truth in a democracy, I believe this response to Americans' deepening political divisions is missing something.

Fact-checking may be vital for media literacy, discouraging politicians from lying and correcting the journalistic record. But I worry about citizens hoping for too much from fact-checking, and that fact checks oversimplify and distort Americans' political conflicts.

Whether democracy requires a shared sense of reality or not, the more fundamental prerequisite is that citizens are capable of civilly working through their disagreements.

Curing misinformation?

Misinformation is no doubt troubling. COVID-19 fatalities and vaccine refusal are much higher among Republicans, who are more likely to believe unproven claims that COVID-19 deaths are intentionally exaggerated or that the vaccine harms reproductive health. And studies find that exposure to misinformation is correlated with a reduced willingness to get vaccinated.

Brookings Institution researchers found fact-checking mostly influences the politically uncommitted - those who do not have much information about an issue, rather than those who have inaccurate information. And debunking can backfire: Informing people that the flu shot cannot cause the flu or that the MMR injection is safe for children may make vaccine skeptics even more hesitant. Some participants in a study appeared to reject the information because it threatened their worldview. But some scientists say that fact-checking only very rarely backfires.

A 2019 experiment found that carefully crafted rebuttals to misinformation could dull the effects of false claims about vaccines or climate change, even for conservatives.

Still, a 2020 meta-analysis, a study that systematically combines dozens of research findings, concluded that fact-checking's impact on people's beliefs is " quite weak." The more that a study looked like the real world, the less fact-checking changed participants' minds.

Not that simple

The task of fact-checking also comes with its own set of problems. In my view, when the science is complex and uncertain, fact-checking's biggest risk is exaggerating scientific consensus.

For example, the idea that COVID-19 might have emerged, or escaped, from a Wuhan, China, laboratory was labeled as " doubtful" in 2020 by The Washington Post's fact-checkers. Facebook flagged it as " false information" in early 2021. But many scientists think the hypothesis merits investigation.

Or consider how USA Today has labeled as "false" the idea that "natural" immunity protects as well as vaccination. The newspaper's fact-checkers only cited a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study and did not address earlier Israeli research suggesting the exact opposite. When fact-checkers show limited views of the facts in a scientific debate, they can leave citizens with the impression that the science is settled when it really may not be.

Exaggerating the certainty of science can undermine public trust in science and journalism. When fact checks about masking flip-flopped in 2020, some people wondered whether the experts behind the fact checks were being genuine.

Also lost in worries about the dangers of misinformation is the reality that factually dubious speech can be politically important. A screed against the MMR vaccine might repeat a discredited claim about immunization causing autism, but it also contains vital political facts: Some people distrust the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry and resent the amount of control they feel that state health officials wield over them.

Citizens don't just need to be alerted to potential misinformation. They need to know why other people are skeptical of officials and their facts.

No winners, no losers

The problems that Americans face are often too complex for fact-checking. And people's conflicts run far deeper than a belief in falsehoods.

Maybe it is better to let go, at least a little, of the idea that Americans must occupy a shared reality. The point of political systems is to peaceably resolve conflicts. It may be less important to our democracy that the media focus on factual clarity, and more vital that it helps people to disagree more civilly.

Psychologist Peter Coleman studies how people discuss contentious issues. He has found that those conversations aren't constructive when participants think of them in terms of truth and falsehood or pro and con positions, which tend to spur feelings of contempt.

Rather, productive discussions about difficult topics happen by encouraging participants to see reality as complex. Simply reading an essay highlighting the contradictions and ambiguities in an issue leads people to argue less and converse more. The focus becomes mutual learning rather than being right.

But it isn't clear how best to bring Coleman's findings out of the laboratory and into the world.

I propose that news outlets offer not only fact checks but also "disagreement checks."

Rather than label the "lab leak" hypothesis or "natural immunity" idea as true or false, disagreement checkers would highlight the complicated sub-issues involved. They would show how the uncertain science looks very different depending on people's values and level of trust.

Disagreement checks would be less concerned, for instance, with the correctness of calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer". Instead they would focus on exploring why some citizens might favor untested treatments over the vaccine, focusing on reasons other than misinformation.

Maybe some combination of fact-checking and other tools can curb the public's susceptibility to being misled. But by focusing a little less on the facts and more on the complexities of the problems that divide them, Americans can take one big step back from the abyss, and toward each other.

[ Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

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Fact-checking may be important, but it won't help Americans learn to disagree better

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Entering the new year, Americans are increasingly divided. They clash not only over differing opinions on COVID-19 risk or abortion, but basic facts like election counts and whether vaccines work. Surveying rising political antagonism, journalist George Packer recently wondered in The Atlantic, "Are we doomed?"

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A Big Think article and podcast, looking at how political partisanship can affect our ability to remember things accurately. 

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A Big Think article and podcast, looking at how political partisanship can affect our ability to remember things accurately. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does it argue that “memory is a tricky thing” and what examples does it give to support this? How does the phenomenon of false memories occur, and what relationship does this have with our cognitive ability - and how are we sometimes vulnerable to ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’? What effect can political partisanship have on our capability to recall past events objectively? Overall, do we need to escape our political affiliations in order to ensure our memory functions accurately?

Key terms False memories, Cognitive ability, Pseudo-profound bullshit, Partisanship

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Memory is a tricky thing. We like to believe our memory is accurate, but a lot of people (maybe you!) remember meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Only one problem: Bugs Bunny isn't a Disney character.

Darker versions of this phenomenon exist. The infamous case of " Sybil" - a woman diagnosed with multiple personality disorder - is considered by some to have been an instance of a shrink fostering false memories in a patient in the hope of getting good material for a book. George Orwell commented on the possible political use of false memory in his novel 1984, in which the population of Oceania incorrectly remembered that they were always at war with Eurasia, rather than Eastasia.

Now, a study published in Political Psychology looks into this phenomenon further and examines how partisanship influences false memories.

Politics ruins your memory

The researchers carried out two surveys on two different groups of test subjects. Each survey began with a section on the subjects' demographic, political, and psychological traits alongside a short cognitive ability test. The surveys then moved on to a series of vignettes describing events or policies that were either real, misattributed, or outright fabricated.

For example, a "misattributed" story described how Eric Holder (an official in the Obama administration) spoke with MSNBC about negative news coverage of the administration. This event didn't happen, but a similar one did: Bill Barr (a Trump administration official) met with Fox News president Rupert Murdoch. A "fabricated" story described how the Trump administration allowed waste to be dumped into the Great Lakes. Each survey included 18 stories like these.

The authors' most striking finding was that, while most respondents (correctly) did not recall events that did not occur, 30% of them did - and what they misremembered was suspiciously aligned with their political affiliation. For instance, Democratic test subjects were more likely to recall (incorrectly) that the Trump administration intentionally polluted the Great Lakes, while Republicans were more likely to recall (incorrectly) that Trump signed a particular G.I. bill (which was actually signed by Obama).

Why do we have false memories?

What causes false memories? By sifting through the data they collected, the authors found that false memories were linked to cognitive ability - or, rather, the lack thereof. Similarly, being prone to perceive " pseudo-profound bullshit " as deeply meaningful also predicted acceptance of false stories. Narcissism also plays a role; confidence and nonsense often go hand-in-hand.

Furthermore, the researchers found that partisanship influenced the recollection of false memories. Members of one political party were more likely to "remember" events that never happened, provided that the event made their party look good and the other party look bad.

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Politics ruins everything, including your memory

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A new study shows that political partisans are more likely to remember things that didn't happen - as long as it fits their narrative.

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A Time article, looking at the debate over whether to rename India ‘Bharat’, and the political motivations behind this change.

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A Time article, looking at the debate over whether to rename India ‘Bharat’, and the political motivations behind this change.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  Why is there talk of a name-change to India? What is the historical background to changing the country’s name? From the information here, do you think this is an example of a country distancing itself from its colonial past and finding a more ‘appropriate’ name, or a “nationalist push” that indicates “pettiness & intolerance”? To wrap up: What is conveyed by a country’s name, and what relationship do they have with the management of power?

KEY TERMS Controversy, Nationalist push, Colonial past, Appropriate, Intolerance, Authentic

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Why Some Hindu Nationalists Want to Rename India

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An official invitation to a G-20 Summit dinner with the President of India referred to the country as “Bharat.”

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An Atlantic article, exploring the extent to which strong leaders misuse history to consolidate their positions of power. 

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An Atlantic article, exploring the extent to which strong leaders misuse history to consolidate their positions of power. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Which examples does it give of leaders retelling the past in order to serve a current agenda? How credible are their versions of history? What methods do they use to control our understanding of the past? Why does the author draw on George Orwell when discussing these examples? As an extension, what further examples could students find of reconstructing historical narratives (perhaps from cultures and societies not controlled by autocrats)? Overall, how do students feel we can protect the truth about the past - or do they feel that such a thing does not exist?

Key terms False retelling, Autocratic rewriting of history, Historical nihilism, Credible, Absurd fiction, Official account, Truth

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The Russian leader's invasion of Ukraine is founded on a false retelling of history. He's not the only strongman revising the past.

Sitting in the basement of a community center in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, listening to shells being dropped all around us, I watched as a young woman sought to explain the violence to her son. "Who is bombing us?" she asked in Russian, before prompting, "Is it fascists?" The 4-year-old nodded vigorously. "Yes, yes," he said. "Yes, it is fascists."

It was January 2015. Russian-backed separatists had taken control of the city nine months earlier, declaring it the capital of their new Donetsk People's Republic. Yet fighting continued and the truth is, when we were in that basement, none of us knew who was responsible for the shelling: The Ukrainian army was dug in on the city's outskirts, and separatists were firing from positions close to us.

None, that is, but for the mother I saw speaking with her boy. By "fascists," she later told me, she was referring to Ukrainian government forces.

If you got your news from Russian state television, which many people in that predominantly Russian-speaking city and about 90 percent of Vladimir Putin's domestic audience did, there was no doubt about who was to blame: Viewers were told that the conflict in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk was the fault of a "fascist junta" that had seized power in Kyiv and the Western intelligence agencies who were pulling the strings. Russian media published innumerable stories about how these forces had plunged Ukraine into violence and chaos.

President Vladimir Putin's announcement this February that he was ordering Russian troops into Ukraine to carry out a "denazification" campaign-an absurd claim, given that, for a start, Ukraine's leader is Jewish and had relatives killed in the Holocaust-drew on those lies from years prior, lies that I saw warping reality in that basement in 2015. Then, I was Moscow correspondent for Britain's Sky News. Now I am based in Washington, D.C., for The New Statesman, but the memory of that moment has lingered. Listening to Putin's speech on the morning of his invasion, when he declared that he was saving innocents from "genocide" and compared his actions to the heroic struggle Russians waged during World War II, my initial response was disbelief. Then I realized I had heard this argument before.

The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries.

Yet we must not assume that this autocratic rewriting of history, driven largely by a desire to consolidate power, affects only a dictator's domestic population (though it does). In fact, these retellings matter far beyond, encompassing expansive territorial ambitions and aggressive foreign policies that threaten neighboring democracies, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan-and Ukraine-and whip up nationalist fervor against the United States and its allies.

As Putin is currently demonstrating, these questionable historical narratives in faraway autocracies are a problem for democracies too.

During his "re-education" in 1984, George Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, is asked to repeat the Party's slogan about the past. "Who controls the past controls the future," he responds obediently. "Who controls the present controls the past." Though their individual approaches to controlling that past differ significantly, Putin, Xi, and Kim share an obsession that Orwell would have recognized.

Since he first came to power more than two decades ago, Putin has elevated the memory of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is referred to in Russia, to the status of a national religion and positioned himself as the heir to that legacy, and the tireless defender of Russia and Russians everywhere against their contemporary threats. He calls the Ukrainian leadership "fascists" to remind his compatriots of the enemy they faced, insisting that they are confronting a resurgent menace.

He does not, however, invoke the terror and the strategic blunders that the country's wartime leader Joseph Stalin committed. Instead, Putin has sealed off the official version of history from scrutiny, passing new laws that make it a criminal offense to challenge the authorities' account or to question the true scale of Soviet heroism. He has also closed down independent organizations that sought to preserve the memory of Soviet-era atrocities. He is interested in remembering only the aspects of history that serve his current political needs.

In this, Putin shares the same outlook as Xi. They clearly both understand World War II's wider resonance, and the importance of maintaining firm control over their countries' histories more broadly. Xi has identified "historical nihilism," which essentially means anything that challenges the regime's version of history, as a crucial factor in the Soviet Union's collapse, and he has made plain that keeping a tight grip on history is essential to ensuring the future of the Chinese Communist Party's rule.

Like Putin, Xi has passed new laws to protect the party's version of history from scrutiny and silenced dissenting views. He has introduced new memorial days to commemorate World War II and followed the Russian leader's example in 2015 by staging a bombastic Victory Day military parade to mark the anniversary of the end of the war, the first time such an event had been held in Beijing, with Putin as his guest of honor. He has also extended the length of the war, moving the start date back to 1931 to incorporate what had previously been treated as a separate regional conflict with Japan. Though the change has a credible historical basis, the longer time frame also serves a useful political function by including the earlier period when Communist troops played a more active role in the fighting.

As Xi tells the story now, China fought first and for the longest of any of the Allied nations in the war. According to this version of history, Mao Zedong and his Communist revolutionaries are the ones who rallied the population to fight back against the foreign aggressors and demonstrated why the party must always be in power, and why China must build up its military strength. I saw this weaponization of history in person while reporting from China: During a visit to a high school in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui in March 2018, 16-year-old Yang Yuzhe-one of an array of thoughtful, genuinely emotional teenagers in a history class I sat in on-told me of how she had thought "China was always a very strong country, but I didn't know the recent history." After studying China's modern history, however, Yang continued, "From then on, I knew that China must be strong again." Those views are echoed across much of Chinese social media today, as the country's rivalry with the United States grows and the leadership amplifies the idea that modern China must once again be prepared to fight back against its enemies.

Though China's version of history is at least credible, if tailored to serve the Communist Party's needs, across the border in North Korea, the Kim regime relies on an absurd fiction and outright lies. For three-quarters of a century, it has claimed victory in two great wars, insisting that its first president, Kim Il Sung-the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong Un-"liberated" the country from Japanese colonial rule at the end of the Second World War, when in fact he was in the Soviet Union at the time. He then apparently secured a subsequent "brilliant victory," over the United States in the Korean War in 1953, which in this version of the past, the U.S. and South Korea are said to have started.

The Kim family's fiction dominates daily life in North Korea. On a reporting trip there in 2016, I saw the enormous "Arch of Triumph" built in the heart of the capital, which is engraved with the date "1945" to commemorate the first Kim's purported victory over Japan. His grandson's top officials drive around in a fleet of gleaming black Mercedes with the prefix "727" on their license plates to mark the supposed victory over the U.S. on July 27, 1953, the date the Korean War armistice was signed. Even as many of his citizens regularly go hungry in his impoverished and isolated country, Kim has invested ample resources in rebuilding and substantially expanding the country's war museums. Preserving the regime's version of the past is evidently more important than providing for the population's basic needs.

"But how can you stop people remembering things?" asks Winston in 1984. "How can you control memory?" One might well ask the same question of Putin, Xi, and Kim and their own efforts to control the past. They cannot determine what individual citizens think or the individual memories they hold, but they can decide what is presented on the evening news and the information that is available on the internet, and they can make it dangerous to challenge the official line in public.

In Russia, now, it is illegal to call the war in Ukraine a war. Russian schoolchildren are being taught that their soldiers are " defenders of peace" who are " liberating" grateful civilians. Putin quotes from the Bible and invokes the Great Patriotic War to underline the righteousness of his cause as he insists that he is fighting " for a world without Nazism." There is evidence that this approach is working. The mayor of the Ukrainian town of Melitopol has recounted how, in March, he was abducted by Russian troops who told him they had come to "free Ukraine from Nazis." Russian soldiers scrawled the words for the children on a missile that hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk-a grim irony, as that very strike killed children among the many evacuees who were waiting for a train. Xi and Kim must be encouraged by how well Putin's popular support and his propaganda have held up. And that could set a very dangerous precedent, not just for those who live in these societies, but for those on the receiving end of more aggressive policies abroad-people who live in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the countries that surround the South China Sea.

The impulse to rewrite history and appeal to glorious myths to rally popular support is not limited to autocrats. But the real danger arises when the official account becomes the only permitted version of history, as is now the case in Russia, China, and North Korea. Though the leaders of these regimes differ in their approach to the past, all three claim that it is their nation that is under threat, and that they must strengthen their military capabilities and ramp up their political control to defend their citizens.

"Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth," Winston is told in Orwell's novel. The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea take a similar view, and that has consequences for all of us.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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mayor of the ukrainian town of melitopol

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Putin Isn't the Only Autocrat Misusing History

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The Russian leader's invasion of Ukraine is founded on a false retelling of history. He's not the only strongman revising the past.

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A Guardian opinion piece, in which the writer Michael Harriot asserts the legacy of MLK has been appropriated by groups who oppose what he stood for. 

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A Guardian opinion piece, in which the writer Michael Harriot asserts the legacy of MLK has been appropriated by groups who oppose what he stood for. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, why does Harriot argue that King has been “made palatable for white consumption” - and how strong is his case? Why does he believe this has happened? What does this indicate about the way our perception of historical figures (and history in general) changes over time? Who controls history, and what implications does this present for accessing the past objectively? Explore King’s ‘nuanced politics’ in Vox here.

Key terms Virtue-signalling, Caricature, Whitewashing, Cherry-pick quotes, Powers that be, Historical facts

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MLK is revered today but the real King would make white people uncomfortable | Michael Harriot

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Martin Luther King Jr was a walking, talking example of everything this country despises about the quest for Black liberation

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A CNN article, asserting that Xi Jinping is rewriting history in order to consolidate his own position as leader of China. 

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A CNN article, asserting that Xi Jinping is rewriting history in order to consolidate his own position as leader of China. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A good starting point (of course) is the Orwell quote at the end of the article - "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." This is sometimes difficult to make sense of, so what does it mean, and can students think of any examples? Then move onto the article - how does this align to Orwell’s words? What does it reveal about the relationship between politics and history, and the manipulation of the latter by those involved in the former? What challenges does this indicate for those seeking the truth about the past? Check out this article from the New Yorker, looking at the same issue.

Key terms Curated, Control over narratives

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Editor's Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.

As Chinese leader Xi Jinping looks set to seeka third term in power, he is seemingly preoccupied with the past, not the future.

When more than 300 members of China's political elite gather in Beijing this week their main task will be to review a draft history resolution that defines the ruling Communist Party's "major achievements and historical experiences" since its founding 100 years ago.

The agenda of the most crucial Central Committee meeting before the twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle next fall is carefully and deliberately chosen. It speaks of the importance Xi attaches to party history, and his own place in it.

In some ways, that obsession with history can be seen as rooted in a tradition dating back to ancient China. For centuries, Chinese imperial courts appointed historiographers to document the rise of an emperor, which often involved compiling - and rewriting - the history of his predecessor.

To the Chinese Communist Party, history - or rather, certain curated versions of it - can be extremely useful.

China's alleged "historical claims" to disputed territories and waters, for instance, have been used by Beijing to bolster its case for contemporary sovereignty, while the narrative attached to the so-called "century of humiliation" by foreign powers - from the First Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 - has become a central source of legitimacy for the party.

In the eyes of the party's leaders, losing control over these narratives can bring disastrous consequences. The collapse of the Soviet Union - a stern cautionary tale cited time and again by Xi - is in part attributed to " historical nihilism," or the ruling elite's rejection of Soviet heritage.

As a result, the Chinese Communist Party vigilantly guards its own history - by airbrushing the darker chapters of its tumultuous past and erasing particularly sensitive episodes from public memory.

But the upcoming "history resolution" is not only about reshaping the party's past. More importantly, it's a way for Xi to codify his authority and supremacy in the present - and project his long-lasting power and influence into the future.

Since its founding, the party has only issued two such resolutions, put forward by Xi's two most powerful predecessors - Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

Mao's resolution in 1945 established him as the unchallenged authority within the party, after a three-year "rectification" campaign that brutally purged his political and ideological opponents. Deng's resolution in 1981, meanwhile, acknowledged Mao's errors in launching the Cultural Revolution - a political campaign that plunged the country into a decade of chaos and torment (although it concluded that Mao's contributions to the Chinese revolution "far outweighed" his mistakes). But by admittingtoand moving on from past mistakes, Deng was able to usher in a new era of reform and opening up.

By issuing his own resolution, Xi seeks to further entrench his status as a towering leader on the same level as Mao and Deng. Already, he has managed to establish his own eponymous political theory and have it written into the party's constitution, a privilege previously only reserved for Mao and Deng.

Xi sees himself as responsible for taking on the mantle of Mao and Deng's epoch-making legacies, brushing past his two immediate predecessors. In that version of party history, Mao led China to "stand up" against the bullying by foreign powers, Deng helped the Chinese people to "get rich," and Xi is now leading the country on a triumphant path to "become strong."

And to continue to do that, the rationale goes, he needs to stay in power for at least a third term, to steer the country through what he terms the "window of opportunity" for China to catch up with - if not surpass - the West in national strength.

For now, few details about the resolution are known - barring the expectation that it will most likely be passed by party elites this week. The document's title indicates a more celebratory and forward-looking tone than the previous two resolutions, which focused on clarifying the problems or mistakes of the immediate past.

But regardless of the finer details, the consensus among political observers is that the resolution will further cement Xi's authority and place him firmly at the helm of the party for the foreseeable future.

"The essential function of all of this verbiage, make no mistake, will center on the person and power of Xi Jinping, defining his leadership as the way forward, on the basis of an understanding of history that defines his core agenda," wrote David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

As George Orwell's famous quote from "1984" puts it: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

And for Xi, it seems like he's about to control all three, at least for now.

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Xi Jinping is rewriting history. But it's the future he wants to leave his mark on | CNN

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Editor's Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping looks set to seeka third term in power, he is seemingly preoccupied with the past, not the future.

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A Big Think article, examining the efforts of scientists who are seeking to add ‘neuro-rights’ to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

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A Big Think article, examining the efforts of scientists who are seeking to add ‘neuro-rights’ to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A lot of questions centre around this quote from the article: “If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.” How can we legislate within an industry that deals with knowledge and ideas that are constantly changing? What is the relationship between the development of new knowledge, and the moral constraints on that knowledge (ie do they impede or support each other)?

Key terms Cognitive liberty, Agency

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Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays. Other means for inducing OBEs include electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain.

If a well-placed magnet causes you to "leave" your body, what else is possible with a little transcranial stimulation?

This question is of growing concern as wearable scanners become increasingly common. Last week, Columbia University neuroscience professor Rafael Yuste advocated for the United Nations to adopt "neuro-rights" into its Universal Declaration of Human Rights thanks to a burgeoning industry promising to alter-some would say manipulate -consciousness.

As Yuste phrased it during an online conference,

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people. This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

Neurotechnology is a growing field that includes a range of technologies that influence higher brain activities. Therapeutics designed to repair and improve brain function are included in this discipline-interventions for sleep problems, overstimulation, motor coordination, epilepsy, even depression.

So are more insidious intentions, however. You can imagine such devices in the hands of a cult leader, for example. Or perhaps a political leader steeling up their base. If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.

The ethical question is not new. For example, the debate over embryonic stem cells raged for years. Promises of trait enhancement concerned people who thought scientists would play the role of a god. While that debate has mostly died down, the use of neurotechnology by militaries and tech companies-particularly concerning privacy-will be contentious for decades.

Cognitive liberty is a term assigned to those who believe every individual must be allowed to maintain their own agency. An extension of the concept of freedom of thought, cognitive liberty is defined as "the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full power of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought," as written by neuroethicist Dr. Wrye Sententia and legal theorist Richard Glen Boire.

The challenges to cognitive liberty include privacy, which they argue must encompass the domain of inner thought; autonomy, so that thought processes remain the province of the individual; and choice, provided that the individual is not harming others.

Yuste believes the U.N.'s declaration, which was created in the wake of World War II in 1948, needs immediate revision. Deep brain stimulation is already an FDA-approved procedure. Whereas social media creates its own addiction and mental health problems, a sense of agency still exists. When tech has the capability to get " under the skull and get at our neurons," as Johns Hopkins professor of neurology and neuroscience, John Krakauer, says, a sense of urgency exists.

For Yuste it's completely a matter of agency-and liberty.

"This is the first time in history that humans can have access to the contents of people's minds. We have to think very carefully about how we are going to bring this into society."

-

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

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Scientists urge UN to add 'neuro-rights' to Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays.

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An AP article that looks at how different interpretations of words can lead to different outcomes of meaning - and how our political affiliations drive this. 

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An AP article that looks at how different interpretations of words can lead to different outcomes of meaning - and how our political affiliations drive this. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Focus on the word ‘fight’ - how should we interpret it? How do our political perspectives affect the way we do so? What does this indicate about our ability to use language objectively?

Key terms Political speech, Context, Free speech vs. incitement

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A fight or a ‘fight’? In impeachment, a clash about context

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Was he calling for a fight, or was he calling for a “fight”? In American political speech — and particularly in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and the discussions around it — words matter…

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A Guardian article, examining how AI is impacting on democracy in both positive and negative ways.

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A Guardian article, examining how AI is impacting on democracy in both positive and negative ways.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How is AI affecting the way we interact with democracy?

KEY TERMS Truth and trust, Information ecosystems, Verified information, Facilitate dialogue, Incentives, Distrusted information

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he YouTube clip I return to most often is David Bowie being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 1999. Bowie is talking about what the internet might do: "I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think that the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying."

"It's just a tool, isn't it?" condescends Paxman. "It's an alien life form," insists Bowie. "Is there life on Mars? Yes, and it's just landed here."

At the time of that Bowie interview I was writing a university dissertation titled Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace: the Challenge the Internet Poses to the Constitution of the United States. It was a heady time. The peak of internet utopia, with tech idealists promising that the decentralising nature of the internet would radically reform power dynamics, and democracy could be reborn.

Fast forward 25-odd years and we know the opposite has happened: truth and trust have been eroded, democracy has failed to reform for the digital age and the relationship between those in power and those who elect them is strained to breaking point. It's at this moment that we are seeing the proliferation of generative AI, and understandably the response has been a mixture of hysteria and hope.

The hysteria about killer robots risks masking the real societal impacts that industrial revolutions inevitably have, sifting winners and losers, and disrupting ways of living in more subtle and sometimes pernicious ways. But there is hope for democracy in the AI revolution - if we put the right guardrails around it.

If we make AI work for democracy, then in 10 years' time our information ecosystems could be vastly improved to support democratic decision-making. We could train AI to value verified information, and serve it in ways that make the most complex information more accessible to more people.

Jim Knight, then minister of schools, launches a technology campaign in a London school in 2008. Photograph: Adrian Brooks/Imagewise/PA Wire/PA Photos

Politicians could be more trusted to do the right thing by people, because they've learned new ways to involve people in decision-making. AI citizens' assemblies could help people and politicians to navigate through the trade-offs required to tackle the big problems. These concepts are not entirely outlandish. Polis is one such tool, developed in the US and used to shape policies most extensively in Taiwan, including to design regulation for Uber. Deceptively simple, Polis maps people's views according to consensus, rather than division, and gives people options to suggest policy ideas. In the UK, we at Demos have worked with the Cabinet Office on Polis projects to engage experts and the public in the 2021 integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy. Andrew Gray, an independent candidate in July's Selby and Ainsty byelection, is using it to power all his policies, declaring himself the first AI-powered politician.

In a decade's time we could repair the relationship between state and citizen. It could facilitate dialogue between MPs and constituents, enabling elements of direct democracy to supplement our representative system. AI could also allow for the better use of citizens' data to target public services, interventions and support people on a more human level. AI could be used to guide people to access help from the state.

But this will only happen if we make it happen. Because right now the incentives to develop generative AI are all commercial, with investors steering the development of the technology in ways that threaten to further leave democracy behind - not least because the talent, expertise and infrastructure follows the money, rather than where it could be used for common good.

The Labour peer Jim Knight, who has been close to the latest digital bills going through parliament, makes a startling point: there are four legislative processes regarding digital under way at the moment, if you include the AI white paper published earlier this year. None of them mention protecting or promoting democracy as an explicit aim. Instead, they are concerned with online safety, digital markets and data protection. Democracy is the elephant in the room.

Without focusing explicitly on the potential for AI to improve democracy - or at least do no harm - it will most probably corrupt. Distrusted information will proliferate, further eroding trust. But without explicitly updating our democracy to encompass more participatory activities that could be facilitated through these technologies, we will increasingly be left in a system that is centuries out of date, trying to govern in a world that moves at completely different speeds and in completely different ways. We have to learn this time.

Polly Curtis is chief executive of the cross-party thinktank Demos

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Artificial intelligence is powering politics - but it could also reboot democracy | Polly Curtis

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Generative AI can involve citizens directly in decision-making, but not while developers' incentives are only financial, says Polly Curtis, chief executive of Demos

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An Aeon video, which tries to figure out whether the success of democracy can be mathematically proven. 

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An Aeon video, which tries to figure out whether the success of democracy can be mathematically proven. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What were the ideas of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Nicolas de Condorcet on the best way to govern a state? How did de Condorcet try to justify his theories? What counter arguments can we offer to his ideas - and what are the implications of these? To wrap up: To what extent can we apply a mathematical, data-driven approach to understanding political and social realities?

KEY TERMS The jury theorem, Philosophical speculation vs. mathematical truth, Empirical and philosophical complexities, Consensus

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Plato believed that public policy should be the purview of a small group of wise leaders; in his view, ordinary citizens couldn't possibly be well informed enough to arrive at the decisions that would best align with the common good. Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed, countering that normal people, voting for their opinions en masse, could indeed arrive at the 'general will'. The French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) went even further than his contemporary Rousseau, proposing that, not only could the wisdom of the crowd be trusted to reach the most beneficial conclusions, but that it was mathematically provable that this was the case. This animated explainer from Wireless Philosophy (or Wi-Phi) details the logic of Condorcet's so-called 'jury theorem', while also identifying weaknesses in the perhaps overly optimistic assumptions embedded in his logic.

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Is the idea that democracy always benefits society misguided, or just mathematics? | Aeon Videos

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Can an argument for democracy be based on a mathematical theorem? From Plato's tyrants to Condorcet's 'jury theorem'

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A New Humanist article, exploring the implications of voters in a democracy “getting it wrong”. 

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A New Humanist article, exploring the implications of voters in a democracy “getting it wrong”. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do we understand politics more objectively if we accept the concept of ‘false consciousness’?

KEY TERMS Propaganda and outright deception, Irrational, Truths, False consciousness, Power, Systematic falsehoods, Explanation

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When politicians use propaganda and outright deception, we must acknowledge that voters cannot always make the right decision at the ballot box

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A Conversation article, looking at the findings of a research report about the quality of national elections all over the world. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the findings of a research report about the quality of national elections all over the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do we effectively evaluate the integrity of electoral systems?

Key terms Global assessment, Perceptions of electoral integrity

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A disappointing slide for the US after an election blighted by disinformation. Aaron Burson/Unsplash

Defending democracy has suddenly become one of the central challenges of our age. The land war in Ukraine is widely considered a front line between autocratic rule and democratic freedom. The United States continues to absorb the meaning of the riot that took place on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the result of the previous year's election. Elsewhere, concerns have been raised that the pandemic could have provided cover for governments to postpone elections.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here.
Elections are an essential part of democracy. They enable citizens to hold their governments to account for their actions and bring peaceful transitions in power. Unfortunately, elections often fall short of these ideals. They can be marred by problems such as voter intimidation, low turnout, fake news and the under-representation of women and minority candidates.

Our new research report provides a global assessment of the quality of national elections around the world from 2012-21, based on nearly 500 elections across 170 countries. The US is the lowest ranked liberal democracy in the list. It comes just 15th in the 29 states in the Americas, behind Costa Rica, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago and others, and 75th overall.

Ingmar Zahorsky/FLickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Why is the United States so low?

There were claims made by former president Donald Trump of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Theses claims were baseless, but they still caused the US elections ranking to fall.

Elections with disputed results score lower on our rankings because a key part of democracy is the peaceful transition of power through accepted results, rather than force and violence. Trump's comments led to post-election violence as his supporters stormed the Capitol building and sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the outcome amongst much of America.

This illustrates that electoral integrity is not just about designing laws - it is also dependent on candidates and supporters acting responsibly throughout the electoral process.

Electoral Integrity Project.

Problems with US elections run much deeper than this one event, however. Our report shows that the way electoral boundaries are drawn up in the US are a main area of concern. There has been a long history of gerrymandering, where political districts are craftily drawn by legislators so that populations that are more likely to vote for them are included in a given constituency - as was recently seen in North Carolina.

Voter registration and the polls is another problem. Some US states have recently implemented laws that make it harder to vote, such as requiring ID, which is raising concern about what effect that will have on turnout. We already know that the costs, time and complexity of completing the ID process, alongside the added difficulties for those with high residential mobility or insecure housing situations, makes it even less likely that under-represented groups will take part in elections.

Nordics on top, concern about Russia

The Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden and Denmark came out on top in our rankings. Finland is commonly described as having a pluralistic media landscape, which helps. It also provides public funding to help political parties and candidates contest elections. A recent report from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights found a "high level of confidence in all of the aspects of the electoral process".

Cape Verde has the greatest quality of electoral integrity in Africa. Taiwan, Canada and New Zealand are ranked first for their respective continents.

Electoral integrity in Russia has seen a further decline following the 2021 parliamentary elections. A pre-election report warned of intimidation and violence against journalists, and the media "largely promote policies of the current government". Only Belarus ranks lower in Europe.

Globally, electoral integrity is lowest in Comoros, the Central African Republic and Syria.

Money matters

How politicians and political parties receive and spend money was found to be the weakest part of the electoral process in general. There are all kinds of threats to the integrity of elections that revolve around campaign money. Where campaign money comes from, for example, could affect a candidate's ideology or policies on important issues. It is also often the case that the candidate who spends the most money wins - which means unequal opportunities are often part and parcel of an election.

It helps when parties and candidates are required to publish transparent financial accounts. But in an era where "dark money" can be more easily transferred across borders, it can be very hard to trace where donations really come from.

There are also solutions for many of the other problems, such as automatic voter registration, independence for electoral authorities, funding for electoral officials and electoral observation.

Democracy may need to be defended in battle, as we are currently seeing in Ukraine. But it also needs to be defended before it comes to all-out conflict, through discussion, protest, clicktivism and calls for electoral reforms.

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Elections: a global ranking rates US weakest among liberal democracies

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Misinformation spread by the former president cast doubt on the latest vote.

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A Guardian article, looking at how the British Museum has been flooded by calls on Instagram, demanding that it return the Easter Island statues.  

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A Guardian article, looking at how the British Museum has been flooded by calls on Instagram, demanding that it return the Easter Island statues.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE (How) should debates about the return of indigenous artifacts be managed?

KEY TERMS Self-promotion vs. genuine concern, Cultural authority, Rightful owner

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The British Museum is tackling an influx of social media trolls from Chile, who have flooded the museum's Instagram posts calling for the return of a moai statue, one of the stone monuments from Easter Island.

The museum has two moai, which were taken from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by British surveyors in 1868, and there have been longstanding demands for the British to return them to Rapa Nui, which is Chilean territory.

Since January, Chilean social media users have inundated the museum's Instagram comment section, while also targeting its YouTube and Facebook pages.

In response, the museum was forced to close comments on recent Instagram posts but has since reopened most of them, although comments are still limited on certain posts.

The online campaign began after the Santiago-based influencer Mike Milfort encouraged his 1 million followers to take to their keyboards and demand the museum return the monoliths.

The subject of the stolen moai appears routinely in Milfort's viral videos, generating a hashtag trend that reached as far as the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, who expressed support during an interview on Chilean radio.

Yet the action has stirred criticism on the island itself. Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Rapa Nui, said Boric "should not politicise something that is so holistically, spiritually and culturally important to us".

Rapa Nui, which is 2,300 miles west of mainland Chile, has a distinct Polynesian identity.

Islanders have expressed a desire for greater autonomy from Chile, which annexed the island in 1888.

Edmunds Paoa is also critical of Milfort's campaign and is concerned the moai have been reduced to an internet meme, motivated by self-promotion rather than genuine concern. "It's an abuse [of the situation]", he said.

The British Museum indefinitely deactivated comments on a post made in collaboration with the charity the Youth Project. A spokesperson said the decision was made for the "comfort and security" of the Youth Project.

Dozens of other collaborative posts on the museum's page also deactivated comments due to the trolling.

"We welcome debate, but this has to be balanced against the need for safeguarding considerations," a museum spokesperson said.

The museum said it had "good and open relations" with colleagues in Rapa Nui, having recently invited Rapa Nui collaborators to London for "various initiatives" in the past two years.

Rapa Nui is home to more than 1,000 moai statues, which are admired across the world for their size and the mystery of how they were made and transported. They were crafted to hold ancestral spirits, hundreds of years before European colonisation.

One of the moai in the British Museum - the Hoa Hakananai'a - is of particular significance to Rapa Nui. Its name translates as "the Stolen Friend".

Uniquely carved from basalt and with petroglyphs on its back, the Hoa Hakananai'a was found in a sacred house at the site of an ancestral tradition called the Tangata manu(bird man).

During the Tangata manu, men from different Rapa Nui clans competed for island governance. The winner was the first to swim the open sea to a nearby island, retrieve an egg of the nesting sooty tern bird, and return to shore with the egg intact.

The Tangata manu was held annually to prevent war from breaking out between the clans, which is why the Hoa Hakananai'a is considered a profound symbol of peace.

In 2018, Rapa Nui issued a written request for the return of the two moai. In response, a reciprocal visit between island and museum representatives took place.

Last year, the island's elders' council, considered its cultural authority, wrote to King Charles to once again request the return of the moai. They have not received an answer.

"We are not ruling out that the Hoa Hakananai'a could stay in London and be our great ambassador," said Edmunds Paoa. "But we need to firmly establish that its rightful owner is the culture of Rapa Nui."

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British Museum's Instagram flooded with calls to return Easter Island statue

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Chilean social media users target institution, forcing it at one point to close comments on posts

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This highly partisan Guardian article looks at the process whereby people arrived at their position on Brexit. 

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This highly partisan Guardian article looks at the process whereby people arrived at their position on Brexit. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Ian McEwan, the novelist, offers a virulent attack on ‘reason’, arguing that the decision to leave Europe was achieved via manipulation and dishonesty. Is this an example of reasoned argument? Is it possible to apply reasoned argument to such emotive issues? Can politics ever be studied objectively?

KEY TERMS Cynical, Reasoned argument, Argot, Nationalism

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Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country’s history, is done

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The magic dust of populism has blinded reason, and damage and diminishment lie ahead

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A Conversation article, looking at how punctuation has been adapted as a central tool of Black activism. 

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A Conversation article, looking at how punctuation has been adapted as a central tool of Black activism. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, get students to grasp the general gist of the article - how can punctuation be used to “extend, contradict and play with meaning”? Then think about the way this power can be harnessed, and used in the context of activism. What does this tell us about the role of language in changing the world, informing people of viewpoints, and persuading them to help move society forward?

KEY TERMS Power, Dominant narrative

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Playing with syntax, capitalization and punctuation marks can upend narratives put forth by the mainstream media. Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Using punctuation and capitalization as a form of protest doesn't exactly scream radicalism.

But in debates over racial justice, punctuation can carry a lot of weight.

During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, mainstream news organizations grappled with whether to capitalize the first letter of "black" when referring to Black people. Of course, writing "Black" was already common practice in activist circles. Eventually The Associated Press, The New York Times, USA Today and many other outlets declared that they, too, would capitalize that first letter.

It turns out the push to capitalize "black" is only the most recent way Black writers and activists have pushed back against entrenched power through ostensibly bland elements of writing.

As I discuss in my recent book, " Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures," Black activism in the media can take a variety of forms - some more subtle than others.

Seemingly unimportant elements of writing have long been adapted as tools of Black activism. Much like the recent drive to capitalize "black," activists have deployed punctuation to question the legitimacy of confessions, criticize justifications made for lynchings and highlight the undervaluing of Black expertise and knowledge.

The power of punctuation

Punctuation was developed in the 3rd century B.C. to visually separate sentences and improve comprehension. But punctuation can do more than clarify. It can extend, contradict and play with meaning.

Think of the difference between ending a sentence with an exclamation point and with an ellipsis, or the way emoticons made of repurposed punctuation can be used to denote sarcasm or add playfulness and emotion.

This makes it a useful tool for activists who seek to upend dominant narratives.

Quotation marks convey suspicion

A push to capitalize has actually happened before.

In the 1920s, influential Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote to The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica to argue that the word "negro" ought to have its first letter capitalized.

A decade later, to counter racism in the white press, the Black press used quotation marks when reporting on the case of a young man named Robert Nixon, who was convicted of murder.

In 1938, the white-owned Chicago Tribune notoriously described Nixon - who would serve as the basis for protagonist Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's 1940 novel " Native Son " - as an "animal" whose "physical characteristics suggest an earlier link in the species."

However, the city's influential Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, covered the case differently, reporting Nixon's claim that his confession was the result of police coercion. In a 1938 article, the Defender included a subheading that declared, "Nixon Also Refutes 'Confession'."

These simple quotation marks signaled doubt over the legitimacy of this confession, while teaching newspaper readers to be suspicious of so-called legal facts.

As sociologist Mary Pattillo notes in her book " Black on the Block," the Defender's strategic use of quotation marks called into question official accounts of Nixon as a murderer. In doing so, the paper highlighted the unfair treatment of Black people by the media, police and court system.

The code of the question mark

Similarly, Black activists used question marks to criticize mainstream accounts of events during the Jim Crow era.

In her 1892 pamphlet " Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells used question marks in parentheses on four occasions to interrogate descriptions of crimes supposedly committed by Black Americans.

For example, she wrote, "So great is Southern hate and prejudice, they legally(?) hung poor little thirteen year old Mildrey Brown at Columbia, S. C., Oct. 7th, on the circumstantial evidence that she poisoned a white infant."

She also quoted from one of her earlier newspaper editorials in which she discussed the lynchings of eight Black men by saying that, in each case, "citizens broke(?) into the penitentiary and got their man." The question mark casts doubt on this "break-in" and suggests that the perpetrators were, in fact, aided and abetted by law enforcement in murdering these men.

These simple question marks subtly undermined a legal system that sought to cast the murders of a young girl and eight men as just responses. Wells indicted not only the legal system but also the white press, which was often an accomplice to racial violence.

[ Over 106,000 readers rely on The Conversation's newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Afrofuturist questions

The writer, editor and activist Pauline E. Hopkins similarly used question marks within parentheses in her early Afrofuturist novel " Of One Blood."

The novel - which contains depictions of a leopard attack, a lost African city and a ghost - was serialized in the pages of the Colored American Magazine from 1902 to 1903. At one point, the protagonist, a Black doctor, brings a patient back to life. Yet the responses to this miracle display ambivalence:

"The scientific journals of the next month contained wonderful and wondering (?) accounts of the now celebrated case, - re-animation after seeming death."

Much as Wells used the question mark to dismiss the official accounts of lynchings, Hopkins deploys it to undermine the scientific establishment and cast doubt on the journals for their stunned and disbelieving responses to the medical marvel.

For Hopkins, the question mark worked to demand respect for Black expertise and knowledge.

Punctuation's possibilities

Punctuation activism can be an important companion to on-the-ground activism. It reveals language's capacity to transform the world. At the same time, it exposes language's often hidden role in maintaining structures of power.

Certainly, punctuation - like language overall - is typically used in less radical ways. But these examples of early 20th century Black writers, activists and journalists point to punctuation's possibilities in questioning entrenched power structures and laying claim to alternative futures.

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How Black writers and journalists have wielded punctuation in their activism

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Using punctuation and capitalization as a form of protest doesn't exactly scream radicalism. But in debates over racial justice, punctuation can carry a lot of weight. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, mainstream news organizations grappled with whether to capitalize the first letter of "black" when referring to Black people.

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A USA Today article, exploring how we use language to explain and make sense of the protests against the killing of George Floyd, and the racism that exists in society. 

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A USA Today article, exploring how we use language to explain and make sense of the protests against the killing of George Floyd, and the racism that exists in society. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Does society suffer from racism, or structural racism? Are people protesting, or rioting? Is there looting going on, or the venting of frustration caused by subjugation? Check out a couple of related articles as well - for example, what did MLK mean when he said that “riot is the language of the unheard”? And does this Minnpost article get it right when it argues that the protests are the ‘language of grief rather than a  ‘primal scream’?

KEY TERMS Definitions, Loaded term, Political implications, Symbols.

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‘Riots,’ ‘violence,’ ‘looting’: Words matter when talking about race and unrest, experts say

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When “violence” is defined as attacks against property, rather than against people, experts take issue with the term’s use in George Floyd coverage.

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A Guardian article, looking at the destruction of a statue of a slave trader during the Black Lives Matter protests. 

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A Guardian article, looking at the destruction of a statue of a slave trader during the Black Lives Matter protests. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE For some people, the tearing down of a statue is an ‘attack on history’ - on an entity that is unchanging and real. However, if you view history as a constantly developing view of the past then what happened is, in itself, a historical moment, which will be debated and studied (perhaps) for future historians. Do you agree with Olusoga about the correct way to view this event? Does our very conception of what history is depend on our perspectives?

KEY TERMS Attack on history vs. history, Moral stance

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The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue is not an attack on history. It is history | David Olusoga

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The slave trader’s figure loomed over Bristol for 125 years. Now a multiracial protest has achieved what past campaigns couldn’t, says historian and broadcaster David Olusoga

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A Guardian article, evaluating the use of ‘nudge theory’ and why it is being drawn on by some politicians. 

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A Guardian article, evaluating the use of ‘nudge theory’ and why it is being drawn on by some politicians. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Get students to understand what ‘nudge theory’ is first, then how it is being applied by the UK government in order to handle the Covid-19 crisis. What risks are associated with basing decisions on behavioural science? How can conflicts of interest occur? What does this reveal about the level of certainty in knowledge created by human scientists? Overall, what are the problems of linking politics to science?

KEY TERMS Nudge theory, Behavioural economics, Overclaim and overgeneralise, Conflict of interests, Certainty, Confirmation bias.

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I first came across "nudge" - the concept many consider to be the pinnacle of behavioural economics - at a thinktank seminar a little over 10 years ago. We were all handed a mock wine menu and asked what we'd order.

This was supposed to illustrate that most price-aware diners order the second-cheapest bottle to avoid looking tight and that restaurateurs use this to nudge us towards the bottle with the highest markup. I remember thinking it an interesting insight, but that these sorts of nudges were nowhere near as likely to transform the world as their enthusiastic proponent claimed.

Lots of far more eminent people disagreed with me. Behavioural economics looks at how people make decisions in the real world - warts, irrational biases and all - and applies this to public policy. Its signature policy is set out in the 2008 book Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. The central insight is that changing the way choices are presented to people can have a huge impact. Make saving for retirement or donating your organs an opt-out rather than opt-in and watch as people suddenly adopt more socially responsible behaviour. Coming just as the financial crisis hit, Nudge was perfectly timed to achieve maximum traction by offering politicians the chance to reap savings through low-cost policy. Sunstein was quickly appointed to a senior job in the Obama administration, while David Cameron set up the behavioural insights team, dubbed the "nudge unit", led by psychologist turned policy wonk David Halpern.

The nudge unit has since had a mixed track record: there have been some real successes on pensions and tax payments but in other areas it's been a bit of a damp squib. So I was surprised when Halpern popped up to talk about the government's pandemic strategy in the press in early March. It was he who first publicly mentioned the idea of "herd immunity" as part of an effective response to Covid-19 (the government has since denied this was ever the strategy). And it's clear from the briefing he gave journalists that he favoured delaying a lockdown because of the risk of "behavioural fatigue", the idea that people will stick with restrictions for only so long, making it better to save social distancing for when more people are infected. "If you go too early and tell people to take a week off work when they are very unlikely to have coronavirus, and then a couple of weeks later they have another cough, it's likely they'll say 'come on already'," he told one reporter.

Halpern is reportedly on Sage, the government's scientific advisory committee for emergencies, and he is also the government's What Works national adviser, responsible for helping it apply evidence to public policy. So one might expect there to be something substantial behind the idea of behavioural fatigue.

A report on applying behavioural insights to domestic abuse included not one survivor's voice

But evidence presented to government by the Sage behavioural subcommittee on 4 March, representing the views of a wider group of experts, was non-committal on the behavioural impact of a lockdown, noting that the empirical evidence on behavioural interventions in a pandemic is limited. Shortly after Halpern's interviews, more than 600 behavioural economists wrote a letter questioning the evidence base for behavioural fatigue.

Rightly so: a rapid evidence review of behavioural science as it relates to pandemics only fleetingly refers to evidence that extending a lockdown might increase non-compliance, but this turns out to be a study about extending deployment in the armed forces. "Behavioural fatigue is a nebulous concept," the review's authors later concluded in the Irish Times.

This is a common critique of behavioural economics: some (not all) members of the discipline have a tendency to overclaim and overgeneralise, based on small studies carried out in a very different context, often on university students in academic settings. It's extraordinary that Halpern was briefing on what essentially looks like his opinion as if it were science. We won't know how influential it was in the government's decision to delay lockdown until a post-hoc inquiry, but there's no reason to suppose Boris Johnson wasn't listening to his "what works" adviser. "The behavioural psychologists say that if you don't shake somebody's hand, that sends an important message... [about] washing your hands," he said on 9 March.

It's less extraordinary, though, when you understand that the Behavioural Insights Team is a multimillion-pound profitable company, which pays Halpern, who owns 7.5% of its shares, a bigger salary than the prime minister. Here lies the potential conflict of interest: someone who contributes to Sage also has a significant financial incentive to sell his wares. It perhaps explains BIT's bombastic claims - "it's no longer a matter of supposition... we can now say with a high degree of confidence these models give you best policy," Halpern claimed in 2018. And: "We make much of the simplicity of our interventions... but if properly implemented, they can have a powerful impact on even our biggest societal challenges." (It is worth noting that Sir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, says that one reason the composition of Sage has been kept private is to protect scientists from " lobbying and other forms of unwanted influence which may hinder their ability to give impartial advice".)

This hubris has led some behavioural scientists to push their approach way beyond those realms such as consumer policy, where it has the potential to be most effective. My jaw dropped on reading a recent 70-page BIT report on applying behavioural insights to domestic abuse that included not one survivor's voice and in which the word "trauma" appeared only once. It describes domestic abuse as a "phenomenon made up of multiple behaviours undertaken by different actors at different points in time". Its recommendations are that strange mix of common sense dressed up as behavioural revelation and jarring suggestions that tend to characterise behavioural science when it overreaches itself.

Little wonder that a House of Lords committee was highly critical of government tendencies to emphasise nudges at the expense of other effective policy solutions in 2011. Nudges undoubtedly have their place, but they're not going to eradicate domestic violence or end catastrophic climate change.

The problem with all forms of expertise in public policy is that it is often the most formidable salespeople who claim greater certainty than the evidence allows who are invited to jet around the world advising governments. But the irony for behavioural scientists is that this is a product of them trading off, and falling prey to, the very biases they have made their names calling out.

I can only imagine how easy it might have been for Johnson to succumb to confirmation bias in looking for reasons to delay a lockdown: what prime minister wants to shut down the economy? And it is the optimism bias of the behavioural tsars that has led them to place too much stock in their own judgment in a world of limited evidence. But this isn't some experiment in a university psychology department - it is a pandemic and lives are at stake.

* Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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Nudge theory is a poor substitute for hard science in matters of life or death | Sonia Sodha

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I first came across "nudge" - the concept many consider to be the pinnacle of behavioural economics - at a thinktank seminar a little over 10 years ago. We were all handed a mock wine menu and asked what we'd order.