Trump’s Global Tariffs Are Meant for China

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The latest tariff blitz has China in the crosshairs. Building on earlier efforts by previous administrations, Trump’s abrasiveness risks weakening Washington’s hand.

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, marked the formal launch of sweeping global tariffs, capping months of escalatory announcements since returning to office. Amplifying the economic nationalism of his first term, it marks the culmination of Trump’s decades-old advocacy for raising tariffs and reviving American industry.

His latest push builds on more than two decades of previous presidential efforts to recalibrate trade, in a far more aggressive form. Influenced by Project 2025’s chapter on fair trade by longtime adviser Peter Navarro, it calls for rapid, uncompromising trade action to reduce deficits, lower debt, and reshore manufacturing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has similarly framed tariffs as part of a larger economic realignment to restore U.S. industrial and economic dominance.

Though rarely stated outright, Trump aims to break the dominance of China’s export-led economic model, with the understanding that there will be some consequences for the U.S. economy. While his strategy builds on former efforts to reshape trade, the public’s understanding of Trump’s agenda and impression of its execution enjoys only modest domestic support. The gamble carries the risks of global economic destabilization, blowback from allies, and handing China even more power on the global stage.

Protectionism, Free Trade, and Resurgent Skepticism

From 1798 to 1913, tariffs covered 50 percent to 90 percent of income and shielded American industry from foreign competitors. After World War II, however, the U.S. aimed to rebuild allied economies and draw them away from communism by opening its consumer, industrial, and capital markets. Trade deficits emerged by the 1970s, but abandoning the gold standard in 1971 let the U.S. print dollars more easily and sustain the imbalance.

The Cold War’s end in the early 1990s left the U.S. confident it could continue steering global trade on its own terms. It pushed for global tariff cuts and free trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while U.S. corporations helped build up foreign manufacturing, particularly in China, which benefited from preferential trade terms under its most-favored-nation trade status. American consumers absorbed global overproduction, and corporate profits soared, but many American workers were increasingly left behind.

These policies added to the anti-globalization movements of the late 1990s, most visibly at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle, prompting a rethink of trade policy. Domestic industries like steel had collapsed under cheap imports, and former President George W. Bush briefly imposed steel tariffs in 2002 before the WTO struck them down. The 2008 financial crisis brought bipartisan calls for economic restructuring, with the Obama administration pledging to reshore manufacturing jobs. Obama later distanced himself from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a free trade agreement—a move echoed by Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump’s first-term trade agenda broke from the previous caution. Favoring unilateral action, he withdrew from the TPP in 2017, clashed with the WTO, and renegotiated NAFTA. He then imposed tariffs on key trade partners, especially China. By then, the cost of offshoring had become clear. With U.S. corporate assistance, China had gained capital and technology expertise to become the “world’s factory.” Low-tariff access to the U.S. market gave Beijing a $300 billion surplus over America in 2024, and it emerged as the world’s top exporter and creditor.

President Biden struck a less confrontational tone upon assuming office in January 2021, yet he similarly raised tariffs on China. Like China, the EU and Japan had established large trade surpluses with the U.S., an issue he sought to address, but geopolitical unity with the U.S. on the global stage tempered criticism. Despite lowering tariffs on Europe, Biden nonetheless passed the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, both criticized by the EU as protectionist.

Trump’s second-term focus has again hit allies, yet the attention remains squarely on China, with individual tariffs on other countries being paused on April 9, while tariffs on Beijing have increased. Aside from direct exports, Washington also seeks to target China’s role in global trade. Biden’s push to “nearshore” manufacturing to countries like Mexico exposed the limits of decoupling, as Chinese companies quickly established themselves in new Mexican industrial parks.

Many imports shipped to the U.S. from other countries also contain Chinese components, meaning Trump’s 10 percent “baseline” tariff hike on all imports is meant to counteract other countries serving as conduits for Chinese goods.

In Project 2025, Peter Navarro emphasized the role of non-tariff barriers, like strict safety standards, customs delays, and local content requirements, in obstructing U.S. exports. The U.S. uses these, too, and in early February 2025, Trump cited fentanyl smuggling as justification for raising tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada.

Even if a more conventional president follows, Trump’s tariff hikes and resulting supply chain rerouting may prove difficult to undo. Critics question whether this transition can be fast, affordable, or effective, but the COVID-19 pandemic proved supply chains can reorient under pressure relatively quickly, just as China showed its agility by setting up operations in Mexico during the 2020s.

Internal Risks

A tariff war will nonetheless raise prices for consumers and businesses, ending the era of cheap global goods that the U.S. economy has depended on for decades. Countries maintained friendly ties to keep consumer market access and reinvested U.S. dollars into American stocks, bonds, and real estate. Uncertainty over Trump’s policies saw a fake tweet about tariffs on April 7 trigger multi-trillion-dollar swings. Prolonged stock volatility or declines would reduce pensions, household wealth, and corporate valuations.

Some argue that if the stock markets crash, money could flow into and lower the price of U.S. treasuries, reducing their prices and allowing the government to refinance long-term bonds with cheaper debt. However, many traditional U.S. debt holders may demand concessions before continuing to finance it. Treasury yields have already risen, making new debt more expensive, and China, the second-largest holder of U.S. debt, is suspected of shedding bonds to help do so.

China has also retaliated by raising its own tariffs and recently halting exports of rare earths and critical minerals essential for modern technologies. Its state-backed firms can flood global markets with cheap goods and advanced tech, squeezing out competitors. With a growing presence in international institutions and trade blocs, Beijing could increasingly shape global economic norms if these institutions and agreements become more fluid and the U.S. steps back.

Trump also wants to devalue the dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive, but insists on keeping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which eases access to cheap debt. His approach is undermining global confidence in the dollar, even if no clear alternative has emerged yet. Trump’s pressure on a resistant Federal Reserve to cut interest rates further reflects limited borrowing options and coordination in U.S. financial policy as he embarks on major economic upheaval.

Democrats have largely avoided serious condemnation of Trump’s policies, recognizing it may be a losing political strategy. Still, some top members like Chuck Schumer and Gavin Newsom have marked early opposition, along with seven GOP senators who recently voted against Trump’s Trade Review Act.

Trump’s policies have some support from the U.S. business class, which once saw China as a promising market but now sees it as a rival. No longer limited to cheap goods, Chinese companies like Temu, Shein, and BYD increasingly threaten giants like Amazon and Tesla. Any success in bringing manufacturing back will mostly come through automation instead of high-paying jobs, benefiting major U.S. corporations. Still, decades of cooperation with China means that these businesses remain exposed, with major corporate figures expressing public concern and Elon Musk publicly criticizing Peter Navarro’s role in the tariff push.

Trump has, in turn, framed tariffs not only as leverage over trading partners but also as a source of revenue to offset other taxes. His 2024 campaign called for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, down from 21 percent, already lowered from 35 percent during his first term. However, the promised economic boom was not evident before COVID-19 hit, and his suggestion of replacing personal income tax with tariff revenue is also unlikely to generate enough funds to do so, even in an optimistic scenario.

And while the U.S. needs to expand production for both domestic use and exports, current capacity falls far short. Tariffs might push companies and consumers toward new habits, but blanket protection without government initiatives in infrastructure development, skills training, and research and development risks doing more harm than good, and leaves the private sector to act with little guidance.

Compared to Trump’s unpredictable approach, China and the EU have positioned themselves as stable anchors of the global economy. U.S. calls to coordinate with major economic allies like the EU and Japan to limit dealings with China, including reducing Chinese imports and preventing its companies from establishing themselves, risk falling on deaf ears as tariffs have strained ties.

Global Risks

Reducing access to U.S. consumers also threatens a major pillar of global economic stability. The U.S. accounted for roughly 13 percent of global import consumption in 2023, acting as a safety valve for global overproduction by absorbing excess goods.

China, facing a property crisis, high youth unemployment, and mounting local government debt, has pledged to “vigorously boost domestic consumption,” according to the People’s Daily, to help replace American consumers. But its $300 billion trade surplus with the U.S. exemplifies its reliance and more limited leverage for retaliation. The EU has signaled it will not tolerate a flood of Chinese goods, as it, like the U.S., increasingly finds itself competing with China in high-end products.

The EU and Canada have similarly raised tariffs on the U.S. The Trump administration has tested EU unity by courting globalization-skeptic allies like Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, though tensions are likely to deepen before they ease. Europe’s struggle to sustain support for Ukraine against Russia has shown the perils of deindustrialization, a trend the U.S. now seeks to radically reverse ahead of others. And, by targeting allies with tariffs too, the U.S. ensures that any self-inflicted economic pain is matched abroad, making the cost of reshaping trade a shared burden.

Forcing a global trade war—an escalating Canada-China tariff clash in 2025 is one encouraging sign—is likely to further weaken China’s export-led model. As the U.S. signals a reduced role in safeguarding global maritime trade, already strained by disruptions like Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and rising piracy, geopolitical tensions could disrupt other key routes. Without U.S. intervention, free trade will face rising shipping and insurance costs.

Trump frequently changed tactics in his first term, mixing threats with negotiations. If his tariff strategy falters, voices like Kent Lassman’s in Project 2025, calling for a return to free trade, may gain traction. But Trump has been warning of trade imbalances since the 1980s, when Japan and West Germany were his main targets. He seems determined to make reversing it central to his legacy, this time focusing on China.

Scrapping the old, in his view, unreformable system, and embracing whatever follows is based on the belief that the U.S. is best positioned to shape the new system. The question now is which countries will support that shift or be forced to. Whether a complete globalization teardown occurs or not, he appears ready to push as hard as possible within constraints. As evidenced by much of MAGA’s merchandise still being made in China, dismantling Beijing’s advantages in global trade will not be easy.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

Click here to read the article on Asia Times.

Photo Credit: The White House, via Wikimedia Commons

1,3-Dichloropropene: The Dangerous, Sweet-Smelling Pesticide You’ve Never Heard Of

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Regulatory loopholes allow more than 30 million pounds of a cancer-causing pesticide to be sprayed on U.S. crops.

By Caroline Cox

California regulators were stunned by their air monitor results in April 1990. Concentrations of a cancer-causing pesticide at schools in Merced County were so high that regulators immediately stopped any use of that pesticide in California. It’s a chemical with an unwieldy name, 1,3-dichloropropene, that you may have never heard about. But there are many reasons why you should be concerned about its use.

The pesticide, also referred to as 1,3-D, is still a problem three decades after I first wrote about it in 1992, when the detection of high levels of 1,3-D in the air of a junior high school led to serious concerns.

The use of 1,3-D in California was suspended from 1990 to 1995 but continued in the rest of the country. Since then, its use has come back with a vengeance. About 34 million pounds are used annually in the United States; about one-third is used in California. The use of 1,3-D is concentrated in the southeastern U.S., central California, and the potato-growing areas of Washington and Idaho. It is mainly used to kill nematodes, symphylans, and wireworms and control some plant diseases.

In California, the heaviest use of 1,3-D is for preparing fields to grow almonds, strawberries, sweet potatoes, grapes, and carrots. Nationally, potatoes accounted for about half of all 1,3-D used between 2014 and 2018, according to a 2020 United States Environmental Protection Agency report.

1,3-D is manufactured by just one company in the U.S., Dow Chemical, and is often sold under the brand name Telone.

Regulatory Loophole

The story of how and why regulators have allowed 1,3-D’s use to continue and even increase is a complicated one that involves politics, economics, and corporate power. For example, in 2002, California opened a regulatory loophole that allowed 1,3-D use to increase, leading to “unfettered 1,3-D access as its use spread to populated areas near schools, homes and businesses,” wrote Bernice Yeung, Kendall Taggart, and Andy Donohue in 2014 in Reveal.

“The loophole also expanded a key market for Dow, allowing it to sell millions more pounds of chemicals across a state that provides the U.S. with nearly half of all its fruits, vegetables, and nuts,” the article in Reveal added. Yet in 2016, limits on 1,3-D use in California increased again.

In 2022, the Office of the Inspector General at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that “EPA did not adhere to standard operating procedures and requirements for the 1,3-Dichloropropene, or 1,3-D, pesticide cancer-assessment process, which undermines public confidence in and the transparency of the Agency’s scientific approaches to prevent unreasonable impacts on human health.”

In other words, the agency did not do its job. This is in stark contrast to the European Union, where 1,3-D use is not approved.

Elaborating on the extensive use of the pesticide, the inspector general also stated that “1,3-D is one of the top three soil fumigants used in the United States.”

1,3-D Causes Air Pollution

1,3-D typically is applied as a liquid that is injected into the soil. It quickly becomes a gas, moves through the soil, and escapes into the atmosphere.

California is the only state that regularly monitors 1,3-D in the air around agricultural communities, but the few results that have been obtained are extremely concerning. Weekly air monitoring data that began to be recorded in 2011 and has continued as of May 2024 is available from four towns (Oxnard, Santa Maria, Shafter, and Watsonville) where the air monitors are located at schools.

In 2022, about one-third of the samples collected from these air monitors contained 1,3-D. Over the entire sampling period, the average 1,3-D concentration at the four schools was between .09 and .46 ppb. According to my calculations, this is double the safety level set by California’s scientists at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) at the least contaminated school site and 10 times the safety level at the most contaminated school site.

1,3-D is classified as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act and is also designated a toxic air contaminant in California. Regulators in California who modeled high detections of 1,3-D between 2017 and 2020 have found that 1,3-D can drift for more than 3 miles from where it is applied.

Clear Evidence of Significant Health Hazards of 1,3-D

Cancer

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified 1,3-D as a cancer-causing chemical (“possibly carcinogenic to humans”) in 1987. In 1989, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) evaluated 1,3-D and concluded that it was “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” California made a similar classification in 1989. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health calls 1,3-D a carcinogen.

In a 2021 review, California’s OEHHA summarized laboratory studies conducted on rats and mice in the 1980s and 1990s, showing that exposure to 1,3-D caused tumors or cancer in multiple organs: lungs, tear glands, bladder, and breasts.

Asthma and Other Breathing Problems

Regulatory agencies recognize that 1,3-D irritates the lungs. The European Chemicals Agency states that 1,3-D is “harmful if inhaled” and “may cause respiratory irritation.”

The HHS concludes that the “[i]nhalation of dichloropropenes may cause respiratory effects such as irritation, chest pain, and cough.” California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) states, “Acute or short-term inhalation exposure to high concentrations of 1,3-D results in upper respiratory symptoms in humans, including chest tightness, irritated and watery eyes, dizziness and runny nose.” Researchers at the University of California, Merced, found that tiny increases in the amounts of 1,3-D in the air (0.01 parts per billion, or ppb) increased the odds of emergency room visits for asthma from 2005 to 2011.

Genetic Damage

As with cancer, evidence that 1,3-D can cause genetic damage has been available for decades. In 1987, WHO reported that 1,3-D caused genetic damage in mice, bacteria, and laboratory-grown cells from several mammals.

In 2021, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment compiled studies of genetic damage and found evidence of it in mice, rats, bacteria, fruit flies, and laboratory-grown cells from hamsters and rats.

Environmental Injustice

California is the easiest place to evaluate environmental justice issues related to pesticides because this information is more readily available there than in other states. When I combined California’s pesticide use data for 2021 with demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2020, I found clear evidence that race and income play an important role in determining who is exposed to 1,3-D.

Of the 10 counties with the highest 1,3-D use, eight were above the state average for the percent of families living in poverty, nine had median incomes less than the state average, and eight were majority Hispanic/Latinx. The bottom line is that people who live in the areas where 1,3-D is widely used are likely to be low-income and Latinx. While the same detailed data is unavailable for the rest of the country, finding similar patterns would not be surprising if such information were provided.

And there’s more to the story in California. The state has set two different safety levels for exposure to 1,3-D. One was set by the CDPR, and the other by OEHHA. Both agencies set a safety level that is supposed to limit exposures to 1,3-D according to what they believe will only cause one cancer case per 100,000 people exposed.

CDPR’s number, focused on people who live near 1,3-D applications, is set at an average air concentration of 0.56 ppb. OEHHA’s number, which applies to everyone in California and is based on health-protective science, is an average air concentration of 0.04 ppb.

As a result, people who live in agricultural areas, likely to be low-income and Latinx, can be exposed to 14 times more 1,3-D than other Californians.

Climate Change Concerns

Dow in Freeport, Texas, manufactures 1,3-D at the largest chemical plant in the Americas. The plant was built to take advantage of natural gas wells close by. I have not come across an accounting of 1,3-D’s carbon footprint, but given that it is made from natural gas, I assume that the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process is likely to be significant. Millions of pounds of this chemical are transported thousands of miles using gasoline or diesel power, adding to the carbon footprint. Finally, the application equipment used for 1,3-D is typically diesel-powered.

Crops grown without 1,3-D and other fumigants can actually reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A good example comes from research done in California almond orchards in August 2021. The scientists who conducted the study, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, compared conventional almond orchards (commonly treated with 1,3-D) with regenerative, certified organic orchards that do not use 1,3-D or similar pesticides. The study found that organic orchards had 30 percent more carbon in their soil than conventional orchards and, therefore, helped in removing that carbon from the atmosphere and prevented climate change.

You Can Make a Difference

Like many people in the U.S., I live in a county where 1,3-D use is rare, or even zero. No crops grown near me use 1,3-D. But I also consciously choose to avoid eating food that harms people growing or harvesting such crops or those living near fields where they are grown. Fortunately, it’s easy to make a difference. I buy certified organic food as much as possible, especially potatoes and almonds.

Buying organic products is increasingly becoming a popular choice in the U.S., with more than 80 percent of Americans purchasing some organics in 2016, according to a study by the Organic Trade Association. Accessibility to affordable organics is also getting better. More and more standard supermarkets carry organics. In many states, SNAP benefits (food stamps) are doubled for fruits and vegetables, making it easier for SNAP customers to buy organics. Farmers markets, food coops, and community-supported agriculture are other options. The more we buy organic food, the less 1,3-D will be used.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Caroline Cox is a retired pesticide scientist. She was a staff scientist at the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides from 1990 to 2006 and a research director and senior scientist at the Center for Environmental Health from 2006 to 2020. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Austin Valley / Wikimedia Commons

Understanding Zoonotic Diseases: How Humans Get Sick From Other Animals

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The growing emergence of diseases from animals suggests that we need to rethink our reliance on animals as a food source.

By Vicky Bond

Human and animal health are closely linked, with many diseases shared between them. As our world becomes more developed and interconnected, the proximity between wild animals and humans is shrinking, increasing the risk of disease transmission. At the same time, humans are growing increasingly dependent on animals as a source of food.

The emergence of new diseases is an unfortunate byproduct of these trends. According to the World Health Organization, most of the newly discovered diseases in humans—about 75 percent—have originated in animals in the last three decades. Scientists call these kinds of diseases “zoonotic.”

As humans navigate the growing risk of zoonotic diseases, it is essential to understand how reversing our dependence on meat, dairy, and other animal products can help have a positive impact on our health and that of the planet, while ensuring a better life for the animals.

What Is a Zoonotic Disease?

A zoonotic disease is a disease that transfers from an animal population to humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, zoonotic diseases are caused by germs such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. Many different types of zoonotic diseases cause human illnesses that range from mild to life-threatening in severity.

It is estimated that six out of ten known infectious diseases that have been reported globally have spread between animals and humans, according to the World Health Organization—and zoonoses are only becoming more frequent.

What Causes Zoonoses?

Humans worldwide live near wild and domesticated animals, largely thanks to our food system’s reliance on industrial animal agriculture. As we navigate the challenges posed by this “unsustainable agricultural intensification”—that is “[destroying] the natural buffers that protect humans from viruses circulating among wildlife,” according to the United Nations—health experts say it has become crucial to understand how zoonotic diseases can spread.

Direct Contact

Diseases can pass from animals to humans who come in direct contact with them by touching an infected animal, for example, or being bitten by one. Zoonotic diseases usually spread through direct contact with an infected animalʼs bodily fluids, such as urine, blood, saliva, feces, or mucus.

Indirect Contact

Humans can also become infected in an animalʼs habitat or living quarters. For example, zoonoses can spread to a human while cleaning out an aquarium or chicken coop or while handling a petʼs food and water dishes. On industrial chicken farms, birds live in squalid conditions with the floor drenched in urine and feces, leading to the ideal conditions for animals to get sick.

Vector-Borne

In epidemiology, a “vector” usually refers to insects, arachnids, and other small organisms that spread an infection from one host to another.

An infected tick, for instance, can attach to a human and transmit Lymes disease. This is also why mosquito bites can potentially cause severe illnesses like the Zika virus, malaria, and yellow fever.

Foodborne

Foodborne diseases, or food poisoning, can be caused by eating raw or undercooked animal products. Eggs and chicken are among the most common sources of food poisoning. Salmonella and campylobacter—from raw eggs and chicken—are common zoonotic diseases. Chickens are among the most widely farmed land animals in the U.S. and worldwide. The U.S. raised more than 9 billion chickens for meat in 2020 alone.

Waterborne

Consuming water contaminated with harmful bacteria can cause illness in humans. For example, lakes, rivers, and streams contaminated with animal waste might have elevated levels of E. coli bacteria—found in the fecal matter of warm-blooded animals.

  1. coli contamination is one reason why factory farms can have devastating impacts on neighboring water bodies. If ingested by humans, the contaminated water can cause anything from minor stomach discomfort to serious health problems or even death.

How Do Zoonotic Diseases Spread Between Animals and People?

There are many ways for zoonotic diseases to spread between animals and people. However, public health researchers have found a common thread through many of the primary drivers of zoonotic diseases. Namely, factory farming and the consumption of animals around the world are sharply driving up the risks that could cause the next significant outbreak.

Farming and Ranching

By a conservative estimate, the agricultural industry has been responsible for around half of all new zoonotic diseases since 1940, according to a November 2022 paper in Science Advances. Epidemiologists say that percentage is probably higher. Nearly every aspect of intensive animal farming contributes to conditions ideal for spreading disease—overly stressed animals, who often live in sordid conditions and are crowded into tight spaces with one another, regularly come into contact with human workers.

Intensive animal farming creates a perfect storm for spreading zoonotic disease.

Wildlife Trade

In addition to animal agriculture, both the legal and illegal wildlife trade—which refers to the global commerce of non-domesticated animals and plants—are serious drivers of zoonotic disease.

A 2021 study published in Current Biology found that more than 25 percent of the mammals in the wildlife trade host 75 percent of all known zoonotic diseases. Because the complex process of transporting these animals results in “upward of 1 billion direct and indirect contacts among wildlife, animals, and domestic animals,” the studyʼs lead author, K. Nagaraju Shivaprakash, concluded that “[W]ildlife trade… is [conceivably] a significant factor in the global spread of zoonotic and emerging infectious diseases.”

Animal Captivity

Holding animals in captivity and exploiting them for human entertainment poses many ethical and moral problems. Animals in captivity also pose public health risks. Petting zoos and other animal exhibits where humans can directly touch captive animals are particularly concerning. Between 1990 and 2000, more than 25 zoonotic outbreaks were linked to animal exhibits, according to 2007 figures provided by the CDC.

Insect Vectors

There are more than a billion insects for every human on Earth. While these tiny beings are essential to our survival, some can also carry deadly diseases.

Ticks, fleas, and female mosquitoes (male mosquitoes don’t bite) can cause various illnesses, most of which are now treatable. However, one of the worst pandemics in history, the Black Plague, has been traced back to infected fleas.

Deforestation and Habitat Destruction

Deforestation and habitat destruction—primarily driven by the agriculture industry—pose serious environmental risks. When wild animals see their habitats destroyed, they have no choice but to uproot and search for a new home. As they make these journeys, they are more likely to “bump into” other animals, increasing the chances for a once-contained disease to spill over to another population.

Climate Change

For reasons similar to habitat destruction, scientists say climate change is already increasing the chances of humans experiencing more frequent zoonotic pandemics. “Using recent estimates of the rate of increase in disease emergence from zoonotic reservoirs associated with environmental change, we estimate that the yearly probability of occurrence of extreme epidemics can increase up to threefold in the coming decades,” warns a 2021 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Animal agriculture contributes more global greenhouse gas emissions than the transportation sector.

The resulting extreme heat at the equator caused by global warming has many species racing toward the poles for more hospitable climates. This has prompted once-remote animal species to travel great distances, likely increasing their chances of contact with humans and other animals and potentially spreading disease.

Contaminated Food and Water

Food or water that has been contaminated by a bacterium, virus, or parasite leads to tens of millions of annual food poisoning cases and more than 1,000 deaths in the United States alone, according to the CDC.

Norovirus is the leading cause of foodborne illness-related deaths in the U.S. After that, salmonella, C. perfringens, and campylobacter are the next most fatal pathogens. “Campylobacteriosis is the most commonly reported gastrointestinal disease” in the European Union, with more than 129,000 cases reported in 2021, which is a 5.6 percent increase compared to 2020.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control found that chickens and chicken meat accounted for roughly 20 to 30 percent of these human infection cases.

How Are Zoonoses Classified?

Public health experts classify zoonoses by their root cause. In other words, the disease pathogen could be a bacterium, a virus, or something else.

Bacterial Zoonoses

Bacterial zoonoses are diseases caused by single-cell microorganisms found almost everywhere on Earth and inside the human body. Most bacteria are harmless or even helpful, and relatively few cause disease.

Viral Zoonoses

Viral zoonoses are diseases caused by viruses, which are infectious microbes made up of DNA or RNA surrounded by a “protein coat.” They can infect humans, other animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria.

Parasitic Zoonoses

Parasitic zoonoses are diseases caused by parasites that attach themselves to or are found inside a hostʼs body. Parasitic diseases can spread from animals to humans through the consumption of raw or undercooked meat or by consuming food or water contaminated by an infected animalʼs stool.

Fungal Zoonoses

Fungal zoonoses are diseases caused by fungi, spore-producing organisms such as molds, yeasts, and mushrooms. Fungi can cause topical infections on a person’s body (such as skin rashes and brittle nails) or inside the body (such as infections of the lungs or bloodstream).

Rickettsial Zoonoses

Rickettsial zoonoses are diseases caused by an unusual type of bacteria that can live only inside the cells of other organisms. Rickettsial infections are usually transmitted to humans through bites from vectors such as ticks, lice, fleas, and mites.

Chlamydial Zoonoses

Chlamydial zoonoses are diseases caused by a family of bacteria called chlamydiae, one of the most common infectious agents affecting humans. One type of the bacteria is frequently transmitted in people as a sexually transmitted infection—and is often referred to colloquially as chlamydia. Another version, however, affects domesticated birds and can spread to humans when handling their birds or cleaning out their cages.

Mycoplasma Zoonoses

Mycoplasma zoonoses are diseases caused by an atypical family of bacteria that are harder to kill through antibiotics. Mycoplasma pneumoniae can infect the human respiratory system—a mild form of pneumonia is often called “walking pneumonia”—and spreads through tiny droplets from coughs and sneezes. There have also been reported cases of this sort of bacteria spreading from animals to humans.

Protozoal Zoonoses

Protozoal zoonoses are diseases caused by protozoal parasites and often spread from companion animals to their owners. Many humans are protected from these types of diseases by strong immune systems. However, immunocompromised pet caretakers are at a much higher risk.

Acellular Non-Viral Pathogenic Zoonoses

Acellular non-viral pathogenic zoonoses refer to diseases caused by very unusual and not well-understood pathogens, such as prion, a misfolded protein. Prion is believed to be the cause of neurological disorders such as mad cow disease and similar diseases affecting the brains of humans.

Zoonotic Disease Examples

Avian Influenza

Avian influenza, or bird flu, is a viral disease that primarily affects wild waterfowl and domesticated poultry. As of April 10, 2024, more than 85 million poultry have been affected by a bird flu outbreak, the majority of which were egg-laying hens raised in cramped cages. While it has infected humans in rare cases, given the ongoing, severe outbreak in both wild and domestic bird populations, public health experts are concerned about more potential spillover events in the near future.

Due to the sheer number of birds we factory farm, we are dramatically increasing this risk. Keeping birds in closed confines, filthy conditions, and continually stressed is the perfect environment for bird flu to flourish.

Salmonellosis

Salmonellosis is caused by an infection from salmonella bacteria, which live in the digestive tracts of birds and other animals. Humans risk infection if they do not practice good hand-washing habits and consume raw eggs, unpasteurized dairy products, or undercooked meat.

Psittacosis

Humans can contract psittacosis from infected pet birds, such as parrots and cockatiels, or domesticated poultry, such as chickens and turkeys. The illness is usually quite mild and relatively brief in humans.

Rabies

Rabies is a viral disease that can affect any mammal but is most associated with bats, raccoons, skunks, foxes, and dogs. Rabies is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected animal. The infection affects the central nervous system and is nearly always fatal once symptoms are present.

Cat Scratch Disease

Cat scratch disease is a bacterial infection. It can spread to humans when a cat licks an open wound or scratches a person deep enough to break the skin. The infection can cause redness around the site of the wound, swollen glands, and flu-like symptoms. While the symptoms are usually mild, in rare cases, the infection can become serious if it spreads to other organs.

Malaria

Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that spreads to humans through mosquito bites. If it is left untreated, malaria can be fatal, especially in children under five. The disease is most commonly found in countries near the equator, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

Zika Virus

Mosquito bites are the most common cause of the Zika virus. However, it can also be passed from a pregnant mother to her child or through sexual contact. The virusʼ symptoms usually include mild rash and illness. However, it can cause serious congenital disorders in newborns.

Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne zoonoses in the U.S. It is caused by infected blacklegged tick bites. While relatively easily treatable, if left untreated, Lyme disease can result in prolonged pain, stiffness, and swelling, as well as memory problems and difficulty concentrating.

Bubonic Plague

Responsible for the most infamous pandemic in history—known as the Black Plague or Black Death—the bubonic plague still crops up in some cases worldwide. However, outbreaks of this bacteria-borne zoonotic disease can be controlled with antibiotics.

Swine Flu

Also known as the H1N1 flu, swine flu is caused by an influenza virus that began infecting humans in 2009, causing a pandemic in humans, pigs, and birds. Pigs with swine flu may develop symptoms ranging from fever, coughing, and sneezing to depression and a lack of appetite. Humans can get sick from being near pigs on farms or at county fairs.

COVID-19

Scientists agree the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a nonhuman animal. However, there is yet to be a definitive conclusion about the source. According to WHO, the leading theory is that the COVID-19 virus originated in bats and spread to humans via another animal.

Who Is at Risk of Zoonotic Diseases?

As the far-reaching effects of COVID-19 have taught us, no one is immune from getting a zoonotic disease. However, various risk factors can put certain people at higher risk of infection than others.

According to the CDC, children under five, adults more than 65 years old, those with weakened immune systems, and pregnant women are at heightened risk of serious illness from zoonotic diseases.

What Can You Do to Protect Yourself from Zoonotic Diseases?

Animals are all around us, whether they are buzzing around us outdoors, wandering through our backyards, or even living inside our homes. This means there is always a chance of a bacterium, virus, or other pathogen jumping from an infected animal to one of us.

The CDC has laid out a practical list of ways to protect ourselves from preventable zoonotic diseases:

  • Wash your hands after touching animals or animal products. Soap and running water for 20 seconds is one of the most effective ways to stop the spread of germs. If soap and water arenʼt available, using a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol is the next best thing.
  • Avoid tick, flea, and mosquito bites outdoors by wearing bug spray and long-sleeved clothing and paying attention to CDC health warnings in your area.
  • If you have companion animals in your home, educate yourself about what diseases typically affect them and how to keep them healthy.
  • Be wary of animal exhibits and petting zoos.

However, the rise of industrial animal agriculture over the 20th century has transformed our food system into one in which thousands of animals are packed into dense, unclean living quarters—creating conditions ripe for disease. While taking individual precautions to avoid contracting zoonoses is essential, the threat remains high unless we collectively change our relationship with nonhuman animals.

Preventing Zoonotic Disease Globally

Public health experts agree that the world needs to address the primary root cause of emerging zoonotic diseases: animal consumption. A 2022 research article in the journal Science Advances explains that changing how we raise animals for meat is insufficient to stem the accelerated rise in these diseases.

Intensive agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, which drives the global spread of disease. To further increase productivity, animals are increasingly kept in more intensive systems, but this process involves confining animals—and their waste—together into tight spaces. Not only is this inhumane, but in such large numbers and under so much stress, it also greases the wheels for the spread of disease.

Research shows that slowing the spread of zoonotic diseases will require reducing global reliance on animal products as a food source while accelerating forest conservation efforts worldwide.

Ending Intensive Animal Agriculture

Much work remains to end intensive animal agriculture and make the world a safer place for humans and nonhuman animals.

We must hold corporations and elected officials accountable for how their actions affect nonhuman animals’ well-being and public health. Governments must stop subsidizing animal agriculture and instead support more sustainable farming practices.

More awareness is also required to educate people about the atrocities inflicted on animals to support intensive farming and to highlight the overall environmental and health benefits of moving toward a plant-based diet.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Vicky Bond is a veterinary surgeon, animal welfare scientist, and the president of The Humane League, a global nonprofit organization working to end the abuse of animals raised for food through institutional and individual change. She is a contributor to the Observatory. Follow her on Twitter @vickybond_THL.

Photo Credit: Matthew T Rader / Wikimedia Commons

Zombie Tests: Is the SAT Back From the Dead?

Click here to read the article on the Fair Observer.

As some elite colleges resume SAT requirements in admissions, will we ever see an end to the outdated practice of weeding out prospective students on the basis of race, gender, and class?

By Sonali Kolhatkar

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, higher education institutions throughout the United States started adopting a progressive standard of education that advocates had demanded for decades: they began dropping standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT as requirements for admissions. As was the case with so many other pandemic-era societal adaptations—government economic relief that lowered poverty rates, a pause in student loan repayments, free vaccines, an end to public library late fees—this offered an opportunity for a grand experiment in promoting equality.

The move to drop the tests can actually be traced to a time before the pandemic, but it was accelerated by students being unable to travel to testing sites during the lockdowns. Further, the mass racial justice uprising of summer 2020 pressured elites into embracing ideas rooted in equity.

Many celebrated the spurning of tests as the right direction for institutions that have ensured the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy since their inception. But as elite universities such as Yale, Harvard, and Caltech recently reneged on the promise of leveling the playing field by returning to test requirements, are those celebrations premature?

Research has confirmed over and over that requiring students to take the SAT or ACT weeds out women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. As a physics and astronomy undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, I participated in efforts in the early 1990s to address how such tests undermine women’s entry into STEM fields. I was a perfect example: a straight-A student whose academic record had only one stain: a mediocre SAT score which severely narrowed my college options.

Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which is one of the leading advocacy groups against required SAT and ACT testing, told the 19th, “Despite the fact that young women get lower scores on the test than young men, they earn higher grades when matched for identical courses in college than the boys.”

Although the SAT has evolved significantly over the years, its origins in racist beliefs are telling. The test’s precursors, the Army Alpha and Beta tests, were analyzed and championed by Carl Brigham, a psychology professor at Princeton University and a eugenicist who believed that testing offered unbiased and scientific proof of white superiority.

Black and Latino students routinely score lower on the SAT’s math section compared to whites and Asians. This is not evidence of a racial difference in educational ability and intelligence as Brigham might have liked to believe. Rather, it is evidence of racial bias in the test.

There is a similar bias based on class. Wealthier students routinely do better on the test than low-income students. This is no surprise given the lucrative industry built on test preparation, helping students navigate the notoriously tricky test in exchange for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The fact that SAT scores are used to determine many a student’s eligibility for scholarships further entrenches class bias.

Indeed, because of the SAT’s racial and class bias, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that officials at the University of California were convinced “that performance on the SAT and ACT was so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race that using them for high-stakes admissions decisions was simply wrong.”

By 2021, in response to a lawsuit brought by the Compton Unified School District, the entire UC system permanently dropped tests as requirements for admissions. The move seemed to herald a new era in higher education, and indeed, data from the few years that this experiment has been in place shows promise in opening up higher education to historically excluded communities.

But, as advocates of racial, gender, and economic justice painstakingly chipped away at the exclusivity of higher education, conservatives predictably pushed back. A wave of right-wing attacks in recent years has taken aim at affirmative action admissions policies, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) campus initiatives.

It was only a matter of time before elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Caltech did a backflip on their commitment to equity by reverting back to SAT requirements. Opinions of elite commentators such as New York Times Education Editor David Leonhardt helped validate this decision. Leonhardt wrote, “Standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives.” 

He highlighted a 2023 paper by an organization called Opportunity Insights to justify reinstating test requirements. The paper concluded that “SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.” It was precisely the ammunition elite institutions were waiting for. Harvard specifically cited the paper in its reversal on testing.

But, according to FairTest’s Schaeffer, the conclusions that Opportunity Insights comes to are flawed. He told the New York Times, “[W]hen you eliminate the role of wealth, test scores are not better than high school G.P.A.” The organization, in a report responding to Leonhardt and Opportunity Insights, accused researchers of omitting student demographics such as “family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity.” They found that when accounting for these critical demographic markers, the SAT fails to predict academic merit and that students’ grade point averages (GPA) in high school are better markers.

Aside from GPA, public school educators have backed the idea of “Performance Based Assessments” (PBA) as a better alternative to the SAT. Such assessments measure the totality of students’ expertise, achievements, and ideas. They are, by design, complex and varied—just as human beings are—and are based on interaction and collaboration—just as society functions in real life.

The SAT is largely a multiple-choice test. It is an individualistic assessment designed for an individualist mindset and is therefore an exceedingly narrow measure of a person. Aside from its essay section, each question has only one correct answer embedded in an array of wrong answers. There is no room for complex thinking and ideas. According to FairTest, “Using the SAT as the gatekeeper for higher education turns out to test one thing above all else: existing station in life.”

Standardized tests, and the idea that universities may revert back to using them, are a source of undue stress on students and their families. Thankfully, thousands of universities and colleges remain test-free or test-optional. Ultimately, only a tiny sliver of the nation’s students are able to attend the institutions that steadfastly cling to elitist practices. If anything, the decision by some to insist on outdated racist, sexist, and classist standards is a further indication of how irrelevant they are to modern American society.

Click here to read the article on the Fair Observer.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Photo Credit: davidjlee / Flickr

The Great Archaeological Discovery of Our Time

Click here to read the article on the Fair Observer.

An interview with renowned archaeologist Gary M. Feinman on the emergence of a global data set from our past that humanity can use to prosper—and avoid the biggest mistakes.

By Jan Ritch-Frel

The motives that drove archaeologists of the past included a thirst for glory, a taste for treasure, and a desire to enshrine a new political era with the legitimacy of the ancient past.

Gradually, over the decades leading closer to ours, the discipline matured, gaining an ethical framework, and started asking questions about the societies and lifestyles of the people who had left their traces behind. Archaeologists began to compare their evidence to how we live now and increasingly started hunting for the origins of modern-day problems, from plagues and warfare to inequality. Archaeological research spread beyond the palaces and cities of a few civilizations to six continents, and the rapid growth of evidence in human origins produced a global outlook and a 6 million-year-long clock to record the gradual changes in the human story that led us to the present.

The diligent research of tens of thousands of archaeologists carefully documenting the past all over the planet has accumulated and crossed a new threshold leading to big implications: It’s socially useful information that we can plug into improving our lives.

Our sample size of this greater past dwarfs by many magnitudes what we thought history used to be. Thanks to advances in technology, the data about the human story can integrate and interact with the records we keep today.

Many modern human problems are the result of “evolutionary mismatch”—our lifestyles are at odds with the biological capacities we developed and relied on for millions of years to get here—and range from heart disease to various forms of addiction and ADHD. A synthesis of human origins research and our new understanding of human biology presents a powerful perspective and roadmap for dealing with some of our biggest challenges.

By combining that synthesis with the archaeological record’s increasingly detailed knowledge of human settlement and state formations, from its origins to the present, we can build from a universalizing framework and global data set. This approach can better integrate the wider body of Indigenous knowledge and worldviews than the Western-based historical models and understanding of the human story that continues to hold sway.

One of the first to see the scale of this opportunity is archaeologist, researcher, and professor Gary M. Feinman, MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Feinman and a growing cast of colleagues have turned stereotypes about Mesoamerican societies on their heads—many were cooperative, relatively egalitarian—and they developed an impressive array of frameworks that allow us to compare different aspects of societies from various times and places, including ours.

Feinman has been a prominent advocate for developing better models to interpret the past and for the synthesis of information across time periods and regions of the planet. We are stronger when we can draw from a broader set of parameters, counterexamples, and nuances that prevent the common human instinct to take off on flights of fancy.

I thought readers could benefit from sharing our conversation about the great archaeological discovery of our time: the realization that this new data set is a powerful engine for the betterment of humankind.

Jan Ritch-Frel: Let’s start with a great essay you wrote in 2023, “Learning from History, If We Dare.” You wrote of a “treasure trove of information that just may guide us toward better futures.” We’re in an era, thanks to accumulations of evidence and technology, where humanity has a critical mass of history at its fingertips that it has never had before. Why is this significant?

Gary M. Feinman: As deep-time historians, we have finally gotten the volume and multiple scales of data that permit comparisons across different cultural periods, over long spans of time, and diverse social formations. In a real sense, through archaeology, we can now begin to assess a truly global historical record that is not narrowly restricted to just literate societies or the European past. For a long time, the classical Mediterranean world or medieval Europe—both known from texts—were used as proxies for humanity’s past. Now, we know that is not appropriate, as our past as a species has neither been uniform nor linear.

At the same time, we now have models that help us identify and point ourselves toward understanding what underpins good governance, collective and cooperative behavior, as well as the causes of economic inequality and their alternatives. The social sciences have finally discarded 200-year-old approaches to understanding the past, such as the idea that the nations of Europe are the pinnacle and end-point product of steady human progress. A historical framework pegged to that framework makes useful comparisons across history almost impossible.

Ritch-Frel: Do we have many examples of our leaders and governing circles daring to learn from anything other than cherry-picked history?

Feinman: The problem is that for centuries, scholars interested in drawing lessons from the historical past have looked principally to the classical world, Europe’s recent past, or progressivist models that made unwarranted assumptions about human nature writ large. Many leaders who saw history through a straw have paid a heavy price.

More problematic are the scenarios that presume humans are perpetually selfish or that our leaders are always despotic or militaristic. These scenarios ignore the nuances of human nature, which include both the potential for selfishness and the ability to cooperate with non-kin at scales unsurpassed in the animal kingdom. Human behavior is always contingent on context, and alone, it cannot account for human history. Rather, we must look for the parameters, patterns, and variability in institutions and behavior that account for humanity’s differences, diverse pasts, and changes.

Contrary to prevailing opinion, there is no end to the debates and lessons we can learn from history. Technologies change, but the basic socioeconomic mechanisms and relations that underpin human institutions have broad commonalities and structures. We know this in regard to scale and now another key dimension: the degree to which power is concentrated and distributed.

Of course, pure reliance on education and exposure to democratic institutions and good governance is not enough for these things to take hold. How institutions are financed makes a big difference, and if that does not change, then political realities will not either.

Ritch-Frel: Since we’ve never had so much history to learn from and make use of before, the reality is that the mechanisms for initiating better use of a more comprehensive history have to be produced. What are some of the key starting points?

Feinman: We first have to recognize that when explaining humanity’s past, history itself matters. The path dependence, or sequence of changes, and existing structures matter. In other words, the social sciences are historical sciences—like biology—but without general laws or mechanical explanations like there are in physics. Even though there are no universal laws of history, we can identify useful probabilities.

How do we do that? First, a comparative study of the past has to allow for variation in sequences, speed of development, and change. Then, as we compare different regional sequences of history, we can study the relations between historical factors and key variables under different parameters. One great advantage of history and archaeology compared to the recent past is that we know the outcomes. We already know what happened, and that gives us the opportunity to understand why.

As we build our understanding of humanity’s global past, the strength of the relationships we see between institutions and factors such as population growth, nucleation, and scale will become stronger. Only through a broad comparative lens, made possible with archaeological data, can we construct a genuinely global archive of histories and heritage.

Then there’s the social modeling question—a lot of historical error has been produced by seeing events as driven solely by the elites. High status generally may come with more clout than others have, but in social formations, there are many other groups and forces that have a hand in determining how events unfold. If we’re interested in greater accuracy, we will include the vantages of the wider population and daily life.

Institutions are part of this mix: They perform functions based on earlier embedded history that people have to contend with and sometimes reform.

Most human settlements and social formations are open—population flow and change are near-continuous. This means that membership and affiliations in our communities and “societies” are generally in flux and have mechanisms that reflect that.

Cultural groups are not homogeneous, and cultural traits do not shift in unison. Some aspects of culture, like worldviews or visions of the universe, resist change. Others, such as how people organize politically or what they do for a living, may shift more readily.

This is where it becomes so critical that we can study the past in both granular and scaled-up ways, using a range of new technologies we have available, from isotopes and DNA to satellite mapping.

The methodology of many research disciplines that use individuals as their key metric has continuously let us down the more our questions scale up—this applies to both behavioral ecology and classical economics. They are useful but conceptually inadequate when it comes to explaining the diversity and complexity of the deep past.

Ritch-Frel: Regarding the educational process for future leaders, where would you start?

Feinman: We need a curriculum for future leaders that broadens their perspective on human behavior and the global past. If we’re going to enjoy the benefits of history, behavior in the contemporary West should not be isolated or considered distinct from the rest. A proper dose of a synthesis of anthropology, archaeology, and history will temper the curricula that prepare future leaders in ways that dampen modernist and Eurocentric biases.

The famous Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) courses at Oxford and Cambridge, which have produced almost all the UK prime ministers for many decades, and the Grand Strategy courses taught at the elite campuses of the United States, are deeply imbued in these theories and presumptions.

Ritch-Frel: Do you think the PPE and the Grand Strategy crowd know they’re holding onto an obsolete and reductive bag and will embrace history and biological sciences, or will this have to be a knife fight in the alley?

Feinman: In so many ways, recent policies and beliefs regarding inequality, globalism, democracy, and migration have been birthed from disciplines like economics, politics, and law, which are grounded in Eurocentric ideas and assumptions. These biases are not surprising since Western social scientific thought grew hand in hand with Euro-American colonialism and contemporary paths of economic development.

But now, our mission is to disentangle and refine our conceptual frames, drawing on and broadening it based on what we have learned. The data we have collected in archaeology, anthropology, and history demand an episode of “destructive science,” a new conceptual development that aligns with what we know, in which we expand and integrate theoretical ideas drawn from economics and politics. And we can temper them with the diversity in practices and institutions that have been documented by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.

Click here to read the article on the Fair Observer.

Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute and a co-founder of the Human Bridges project.

Photo Credit: chensiyuan / Wikimedia Commons

Michael Hudson’s Hidden History of Debt

We’re honored to publish Michael Hudson’s research on the origins of Ancient Near Eastern banking and finance, and the civilizations that emerged out of them in the Observatory.

If you haven’t raced to read it already, if the topic sounds a little out of your interest zone, think again. The systems of finance and banking that much of the world uses on come out of this period and region—and the history has not been properly pieced together until now.

Hudson’s synthesis of the ancient history of debt is priceless—whether your aspiration is to know the economic history of the West, to mildly reform, or perhaps even revolutionize the world around us. We made a guide to give you a starting point. Don’t let your lack of knowledge about the origins of debt stop you—there hasn’t been a mortgage loan officer, World Bank director, or Treasury Secretary who knew much about economics of the ancient past before Hudson started researching it either.

Hudson’s work joins that of other pioneering authors in the field of human prehistory, anthropology in the Observatory’s Human Bridges area. One of the best things to happen in US culture in decades is the growing popular interest in the ancient past. Naturally, for millions in the United States, the first stop on the education journey has picked up with the Roman republic and its descent into empire.

But a careful study of this phenomenon reveals that the surging interest in our past extends far deeper, all the way into human origins— chiefly it’s because we’ve reached a critical mass in archaeology and sciences that allows a deeper and fuller reach into an increasingly global data set about the human past.

In the case of Hudson’s research, we see the gradual development of a core economic thought matrix and social mechanisms that led us to today, and the alternative directions we could have taken along the way. Until recently, economic history before the European Renaissance was an interesting curiosity, but not something that economists or their critics factored into their research.

The news all around us carries the premise that new technological products will deliver humankind into a new era, solve our problems, point us to opportunities.

They just might. But it’s a more likely bet that the history we never had before in such vivid and useful detail—of the rise of early states over the past 10,000 years, and the six million years we spent getting to that point—will enable us to reconsider the ways we live today, and all the pointless suffering we inflict on each other because we thought we had to.

More to come!

—Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the editors building the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Cleveland Museum of Art / Wikimedia Commons

The Right’s Long Game to End Public Education

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona finally said the quiet part out loud.

On February 13, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, did something Democratic officials seldom do in public: He spoke the truth about what’s behind the relentless attacks on public schools by rightwing advocacy groups and their financial backers.

As HuffPost reported, one of the topics that came up during a meeting between Cardona and Black journalists that took place at the Department of Education, was the recent wave of new laws passed in mostly red states that target programs in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education that address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Advocates for DEI programs say they are needed to ensure positive academic, health, and social outcomes for students who often face discrimination and fewer educational opportunities due to their race, class, religion, gender, or ability level. Opponents say they shame white students and cause “reverse discrimination.”

Cardona called new laws passed by Republican state lawmakers to eliminate DEI programs “a deliberate attack on efforts to try to make sure schools are inclusive, welcoming places for all students—in particular, students from different backgrounds.”

But more than just defending schools for embracing DEI, Cardona went further to call out the intention behind these attacks on the programs, calling them “very deliberate attempts to seek division in our schools so that a private option sounds better [emphasis added] for parents.” 

“Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools,” he said. “Four years ago were the masks. [Critical race theory] was a year after that. [Now,] DEI, [and] banning books.”

The serial crises that groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation string together year after year to inflame the populace with fear and suspicion about public schools have been the subject of extensive reporting.

But when major news outlets report on these outbursts of rightwing rage, the articles tend to focus solely on the legitimacy of specific grievances rather than considering whether the attacks themselves could be a tactic in a much longer game.

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Education / Flickr

How Long Has Humanity Been at War With Itself?

Click here to read the article on Asia Times.

Is large-scale intra-specific warfare Homo sapiens’ condition or can our species strive to achieve global peace?

By Deborah Barsky

The famous American astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” But can we ever know the history of human origins well enough to understand why humans wage large-scale acts of appalling cruelty on other members of our own species? In January 2024, the Geneva Academy was monitoring no less than 110 armed conflicts globally. While not all of these reach mainstream media outlets, each is equally horrific in terms of the physical violence and mental cruelty we inflict on each other.

Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are known to partake in violent intra-specific skirmishes, typically to preserve privileged access to resources in response to breaches in territorial boundaries. But only humans engage so extensively in large-scale warfare. 

Do massive acts of intra- or interpopulational violence conform with Darwinian precepts of natural selection, or is this something we do as a competitive response to the stresses of living in such large populations? Looking back in time can help us find answers to such questions. Evidence preserved in the archeological record can tell us about when and under what conditions the preludes to warlike behaviors emerged in the past. Scientific reasoning can then transform this information into viable hypotheses that we can use to understand ourselves in today’s world.

As archeologists continue to unearth new fossil evidence at an increasing rate, so too are they piecing together the human story as one of complex interactions played out by (a growing number of) different species of the genus Homo that lived during the tens of thousands of years preceding the emergence—and eventual global dominance—of our own species: Homo sapiens. In fact, scientists have recognized more than a dozen (now extinct) species of Homo that thrived over the millennia, sometimes sharing the same landscapes and occasionally even interbreeding with one another. Millions of years of hybridization is written into the genomes of modern human populations.

Although we know very little about what these paleo-encounters might have been like, progress in science and technology is helping archeologists to find ways to piece together the puzzle of interspecific human relationships that occurred so long ago and that contributed to making us who we are today. In spite of these advances, the fossil record remains very fragmentary, especially concerning the older phases of human evolution.

First consider Homo, or H. habilis, so-named because a significant increase in stone tool-making is recognized following its emergence some 2.8 million years ago in East Africa. The evidence for the beginnings of this transformational event that would set off the spiraling evolutionary history of human technological prowess is relatively sparse. But such ancient (Oldowan) toolkits do become more abundant from this time forward, at first in Africa, and then into the confines of Eurasia by around 1.8 million years ago. Throughout this period, different kinds of hominins adopted and innovated stone tool making, socializing it into normalized behavior by teaching it to their young and transforming it into a cutting-edge survival strategy. We clearly observe the positive repercussions of this major advancement in our evolutionary history from the expanding increases in both the number of archeological sites and their geographical spread. Unevenly through time, occurrences of Oldowan sites throughout the Old World begin to yield more numerous artifacts, attesting to the progressive demographic trends associated with tool-making hominins.

Tool-making was a highly effective adaptive strategy that allowed early Homo species (like H. georgicus and H. antecessor) to define their own niches within multiple environmental contexts, successfully competing for resources with large carnivorous animals. Early humans used stone tools to access the protein-rich meat, viscera, and bone marrow from large herbivore carcasses, nourishing their energy-expensive brains. The latter show significant increases in volume and organizational complexity throughout this time period.

But were these early humans also competing with one another? So far (and keeping in mind the scarcity of skeletal remains dating to this period) the paleoanthropological record has not revealed signs of intraspecific violence suffered by Oldowan peoples. Their core-and-flake technologies and simple pounding tools do not include items that could be defined as functional armaments. While a lack of evidence does not constitute proof, we might consider recent estimates in paleodemography, backed by innovative digitized modelization methods and an increasing pool of genetic data that indicates relatively low population densities during the Oldowan. 

Isolated groups consisted of few individuals, organized perhaps into clan-like social entities, widely spread over vast, resource-rich territories. These hominins invested in developing technological and social skills, cooperating with one another to adapt to new challenges posed by the changing environmental conditions that characterized the onset of the Quaternary period some 2.5 million years ago. Complex socialization processes evolved to perfect and share the capacity for technological competence, abilities that had important repercussions on the configuration of the brain that would eventually set humanity apart from other kinds of primates. Technology became inexorably linked to cognitive and social advances, fueling a symbiotic process now firmly established between anatomical and technological evolution.

By around one million years ago, Oldowan-producing peoples had been replaced by the technologically more advanced Acheulian hominins, globally attributed to H. erectus sensu lato. This phase of human evolution lasted nearly one and a half million years (globally from 1.75 to around 350,000 years ago) and is marked by highly significant techno-behavioral revolutions whose inception is traced back to Africa. Groundbreaking technologies like fire-making emerged during the Acheulian, as did elaborate stone production methods requiring complex volumetric planning and advanced technical skills. Tools became standardized into specifically designed models, signaling cultural diversity that varied geographically, creating the first land-linked morpho-technological traditions. Ever-greater social investment was required to learn and share the techniques needed to manipulate these technologies, as tools were converted into culture and technical aptitude into innovation.

In spite of marked increases in site frequencies and artifact densities throughout the Middle Pleistocene, incidences of interspecific violence are rarely documented and no large-scale violent events have been recognized so far. Were some Acheulian tools suitable for waging inter-populational conflicts? In the later phases of the Acheulian, pointed stone tools with signs of hafting and even wooden spears appear in some sites. But were these sophisticated tool kits limited to hunting? Or might they also have served for other purposes? 

Culture evolves through a process I like to refer to as “technoselection” that in many ways can be likened to biological natural selection. In prehistory, technological systems are characterized by sets of morphotypes that reflect a specific stage of cognitive competence. Within these broad defining categories, however, we can recognize some anomalies or idiosyncratic techno-forms that can be defined as potential latent within a given system. As with natural selection, potential is recognized as structural anomalies that may be selected for under specific circumstances and then developed into new or even revolutionary technologies, converted through inventiveness. Should they prove advantageous to deal with the challenges at hand, these innovative technologies are adopted and developed further, expanding upon the existing foundational know-how and creating increasingly larger sets of material culture. Foundational material culture therefore exists in a state of exponential growth, as each phase is built upon the preceding one in a cumulative process perceived as acceleration.

I have already suggested elsewhere that the advanced degree of cultural complexity attained by the Late Acheulian, together with the capacity to produce fire, empowered hominins to adapt their nomadic lifestyles within more constrained territorial ranges. Thick depositional sequences containing evidence of successive living floors recorded in the caves of Eurasia show that hominins were returning cyclically to the same areas, most likely in pace with seasonal climate change and the migrational pathways of the animals they preyed upon. As a result, humans established strong links with the specific regions within which they roamed. More restrictive ranging caused idiosyncrasies to appear within the material and behavioral cultural repertoires of each group: specific ways of making and doing. As they lived and died in lands that were becoming their own, so too did they construct territorial identities that were in contrast with those of groups living in neighboring areas. As cultural productions multiplied, so did these imagined cultural “differences” sharpen, engendering the distinguishing notions of “us” and “them.”

Even more significant perhaps was the emergence and consolidation of symbolic thought processes visible, for example, in cultural manifestations whose careful manufacture took tool-making into a whole new realm of aesthetic concerns rarely observed in earlier toolkits. By around 400,000 years ago in Eurasia, Pre-Neandertals and then Neandertal peoples were conferring special treatment to their dead, sometimes even depositing them with other objects suggestive of nascent spiritual practices. These would eventually develop into highly diverse social practices, like ritual and taboo. Cultural diversity was the keystone for new systems of belief that reinforced imagined differences separating territorially distinct groups.

Anatomically modern humans (H. sapiens) appeared on the scene some 300,000 years ago in Africa and spread subsequently into lands already occupied by other culturally and spiritually advanced species of Homo. While maintaining a nomadic existence, these hominins were undergoing transformational demographic trends that resulted in more frequent interpopulation encounters. This factor, combined with the growing array of material and behavioral manifestations of culture (reflected by artifact multiplicity) provided a repository from which hominin groups stood in contrast with one another. At the same time, the mounting importance of symbolic behaviors in regulating hominin lifestyles contributed to reinforcing both real (anatomic) and imagined (cultural) variances. Intergroup encounters favored cultural exchange, inspiring innovation and driving spiraling techno-social complexity. In addition, they provided opportunities for sexual exchanges necessary for broadening gene pool diversity and avoiding inbreeding. At the same time, a higher number of individuals within each group would have prompted social hierarchization as a strategy to ensure the survival of each unit.

While much has been written about what Middle Paleolithic inter-specific paleo-encounters might have been like, in particular between the Neandertals and H. sapiens, solid evidence is lacking to support genocidal hypotheses or popularized images of the former annihilating the latter by way of violent processes. Today, such theories, fed by suppositions typical of the last century of the relative techno-social superiority of our own species, are falling by the wayside. Indeed, advances in archeology now show not only that we were interbreeding with the Neandertals, but also that Neandertal lifeways and cerebral processes were of comparable sophistication to those practiced by the modern humans they encountered. Presently, apart from sparse documentation for individual violent encounters, there is no evidence that large-scale violence caused the extinction of the Neandertals or of other species of Homo thriving coevally with modern humans. That said, it has been observed that the expansion of H. sapiens into previously unoccupied lands, like Australia and the Americas, for example, coincides ominously with the extinction of mega-faunal species. Interestingly, this phenomenon is not observed in regions with a long record of coexistence between humans and mega mammals, like Africa or India. It has been hypothesized that the reason for this is that animals that were unfamiliar with modern humans lacked the instinct to flee and hide from them, making them easy targets for mass hunting.

If large-scale human violence is difficult to identify in the Paleolithic record, it is common in later, proto-historic iconography. Evidence for warlike behavior (accumulations of corpses bearing signs of humanly-induced trauma) appear towards the end of the Pleistocene and after the onset of the Neolithic Period (nearly 12,000 years ago) in different parts of the world, perhaps in relation to new pressures due to climate change. Arguably, sedentary lifestyles and plant and animal domestication—hallmarks of the Neolithic—reset social and cultural norms of hunter-gatherer societies. Additionally, it may be that the amassing and storing of goods caused new inter-relational paradigms to take form, with individuals fulfilling different roles in relation to their capacities to benefit the group to which they belonged. The capacity to elaborate an abstract, symbolic worldview transformed land and resources into property and goods that “belonged” to one or another social unit, in relation to claims on the lands upon which they lived and from which they reaped the benefits. The written documents of the first literate civilizations, relating mainly to the quantification of goods, are revelatory of the effects of this transformational period of intensified production, hoarding and exchange. Differences inherent to the kinds of resources available in environmentally diverse parts of the world solidified unequal access to the kinds of goods invested with “value” by developing civilizations and dictated the nature of the technologies that would be expanded for their exploitation. Trading networks were established and interconnectedness favored improvements in technologies and nascent communication networks, stimulating competition to obtain more, better, faster.

From this vast overview, we can now more clearly see how the emergence of the notion of “others” that arose in the later phases of the Lower Paleolithic was key for kindling the kinds of behavioral tendencies required for preserving the production-consumption mentality borne after the Neolithic and still in effect in today’s overpopulated capitalist world.

Evolution is not a linear process and culture is a multifaceted phenomenon, but it is the degree to which we have advanced technology that sets us apart from all other living beings on the planet. War is not pre-programmed in our species, nor is it a fatality in our modern, globalized existence. Archeology teaches us that it is a behavior grounded in our own manufactured perception of “difference” between peoples living in distinct areas of the world with unequal access to resources. A social unit will adopt warlike behavior as a response to resource scarcity or other kinds of external challenges (for example, territorial encroachment by an ‘alien’ social unit). Finding solutions to eradicating large-scale warfare thus begins with using our technologies to create equality among all peoples, rather than developing harmful weapons of destruction.

From the emergence of early Homo, natural selection and technoselection have developed in synchronicity through time, transforming discrete structural anomalies into evolutionary strategies in unpredictable and interdependent ways. The big difference between these two processes at play in human evolution is that the former is guided by laws of universal equilibrium established over millions of years, while the latter exists in a state of exponential change that is outside of the stabilizing laws of nature.

Human technologies are transitive in the sense that they can be adapted to serve for different purposes in distinct timeframes or by diverse social entities. Many objects can be transformed into weapons. In the modern world plagued by terrorism, for example, simple home-made explosives, airplanes, drones, or vans can be transformed into formidable weapons, while incredibly advanced technologies can be used to increase our capacity to inflict desensitized and dehumanized destruction on levels never before attained.

Meanwhile, our advanced communication venues serve to share selected global events of warfare numbing the public into passive acceptance. While it is difficult to determine the exact point in time when humans selected large-scale warfare as a viable behavioral trait, co-opting their astounding technological prowess as a strategy to compete with each other in response to unprecedented demographic growth, there may yet be time for us to modify this trajectory toward resiliency, cooperation, and exchange.

Click here to read the article on Asia Times.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Deborah Barsky is a writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, and an associate professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is the author of Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Photo Credit: The Trustees of the British Museum / Wikimedia Commons

A Tale of Two Federal Grants for Public Education

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

The Department of Education has separate grant programs for funding either charter or community schools; the latter provides money for what schools and families really need, the former, not so much.

Two education-related grant programs operated by the U.S. Department of Education—both of which dole out millions in federal tax dollars for educating K-12 children every year—present two opposing truths about government spending on public education: that it can be wasteful and misguided, or innovative and informed. 

The first program enjoys the significant backing of industry lobbyists and wealthy foundations, and allows private education operators—some that operate for-profit—to skim public money off the top. It also adds to racial segregation in public schools, and squanders millions of dollars on education providers that come and quickly go, or simply fail to provide any education services at all.

The second program helps schools expand learning time and opportunities for students, especially in high-poverty and rural communities; promote parent engagement; encourage collaboration with local businesses and nonprofits; and become hubs for child- and family-related services that contribute to students’ health and well-being.

These strikingly different outcomes result from two different intentions: the first program’s goal to promote a type of school that is vaguely defined versus the second’s goal to expand a way of doing school that is supported by research and anecdotal evidence.

The first grant program is the Charter Schools Program (CSP), which funds privately operated charter schools and their developers and advocacy organizations. The program, started during the Clinton Administration and greatly expanded during the Obama years, gives money directly to charter schools and to state education agencies and charter school-related organizations to distribute to new, existing, or proposed charters.

In October, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the nation’s top lobbyist for the charter school industry, hailed the federal government’s release of $572 million in taxpayer dollars from the CSP, calling the money “the most essential funding to enable the existence of public charter schools.”

In New Mexico, local press outlets reported that a $52 million CSP grant went to a charter industry advocacy group called the Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, which in turn would award subgrants to individual charter schools. One reporter quoted the group’s leader who said, “There was a large application with several requirements in there. And we were scored based on, you know, how well we met the requirements and a peer review process.”

In Idaho, Idaho Ed News reported about the $24.8 million CSP grant going to Bluum, which the reporter called “a nonprofit charter support organization.” The grant is to be used “to grow and strengthen Idaho’s charter school network,” the article said.

Maryland’s top charter school industry booster, the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, celebrated its $28.7 million CSP saying it would provide “subgrants to open new charter schools and/or replicate and expand charter schools.”

Not all CSP grants went to advocacy groups. The largest—totaling $109,740,731—went to the Indiana Department of Education. According to Chalkbeat, one out of three charter schools in Indiana have closed since 2001.

A 2019 analysis conducted by the Network for Public Education, a pro-public schools advocacy group, found that over its lifespan CSP has wasted as much as $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or opened and quickly closed.

Another CSP grant of $37,579,122 went to the Minnesota Department of Education. In Minnesota, courts have grappled for years with the question of whether racial imbalances in public schools, caused to a great extent by the expansion of racially segregated charter schools, violate the constitutional right of students of color to receive an adequate education.

Other CSP grants went to credit enhancement for charter school facilities, essentially giving public money to real estate development firms and investment companies that finance and build new charter schools.

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Fry1989 / Wikimedia Commons

Election Defenders’ Top 2024 Worry: Online Rumors, Deceptions, Lies Swaying Masses

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Propaganda scholars report few measures change partisan mindsets to avert vitriol or violence. But they hope online influencers will counter some rumor mills.

By Steven Rosenfeld

A decade ago, when Kate Starbird dove into studying how rumors spread online and how people use social media to make sense of what is happening during crises, the future co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public had no idea that she would become a target of the darker dynamics and behavior she was studying.

Starbird, a Stanford University computer science graduate who turned professional basketball player, had returned to academia as an expert in “crisis informatics.” That emerging field looks at how people use online information and communication to respond to uncertain and chaotic events. Starbird initially looked at how social media could be helpful in crises. But she and her colleagues increasingly were drawn to how false rumors emerge and spread. They confirmed what many of us have long suspected. Mistaken online information tends to travel farther and faster than facts and corrections. “[B]reaking news” accounts often magnify rumors. People who fall for bogus storylines might correct themselves, but not before spreading them.

Those insights were jarring enough. But as Starbird and her colleagues turned to tracking the post-2020 attacks on America’s elections by Donald Trump, copycat Republicans, and right-wing media, they were no longer looking at the dynamics of misinformation and disinformation from the safety of academia. By scrutinizing millions of tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and Instagram pages for misleading and unsubstantiated claims, and alerting the platforms and federal cybersecurity officials about the most troubling examples, Starbird and her peers soon found themselves in the crosshairs of arch Trump loyalists. They were targeted and harassed much like election officials across the country.

Starbird was dragged before congressional inquisitions led by Ohio GOP Representative Jim Jordan. Her University of Washington e-mail account was targeted by dozens of public records requests. As her and other universities were sued, she and her peers spent more time with lawyers than students. In some cases, the intimidation worked, as some colleagues adopted a “strategy of silence,” Starbird recounted in a keynote address at the Stanford Internet Observatory’s 2023 Trust and Safety Research Conference in September. That response, while understandable, was not the best way to counter propagandists, she said, nor inform the public about their work’s core insights—which is how mistaken or false beliefs take shape online, and why they are so hard to shake.

“Some colleagues decided not to aggressively go after the false claims that we received about ourselves,” Starbird said—such as accusations that alleged they had colluded with the government to censor right-wing speech. “I don’t think that they should have gone directly at the people saying them. But we needed to get the truth out to the public… Online misinformation, disinformation, manipulation; they remain a critical concern for society.”

Barely a week after November 2023’s voting ended, the narratives dominating the news underscored her point. The reproductive rights victories and embrace of Democrats, led by growing numbers of anti-MAGA voters, had barely been parsed by the public before Trump grabbed the headlines by transgressing American political norms.

In a Veterans Day speech, of all settings, Trump, who is the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, attacked his domestic opponents with rhetoric that mimicked European fascist dictators that Americans had defeated in World War II. Trump called his domestic critics “vermin,” and pledged that, if reelected, he would use the Justice Department to “crush” them. Even the New York Times noted the similarity between Trump’s words to Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Trump’s outburst was one of many incidents and trends that have led election defenders and propaganda experts to say that their biggest worries about 2024 elections concern the reach of mistaken or deceptive propaganda—misinformation and disinformation—and its persuasive power to shape political identities, beliefs, ideologies, and provoke actions.

“It’s no secret that Republicans have a widespread strategy to undermine our democracy. But here’s what I’m worried about most for the 2024 election—election vigilantism,” Marc Elias, a top Democratic Party lawyer, said during a late October episode of his “Defending Democracy” podcast. “Election vigilantism, to put it simply, is when individuals or small groups act in a sort of loosely affiliated way to engage in voter harassment, voter intimidation, misinformation campaigns, or voter challenges.”

Elias has spent decades litigating the details of running elections. Since 2020, many Republican-run states have passed laws making voting harder, disqualifying voters and ballots, imposing gerrymanders to fabricate majorities, and challenging federal voting law. Democratic-led states have gone the other direction, essentially creating two Americas when it comes to running elections. Notably, this veteran civil rights litigator is more worried about partisan passions running amok than the voting war’s latest courtroom fights. And he’s not alone.

“It’s the minds of voters,” replied Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, when asked at the 2023 Aspen Cyber Summit in New York City about the biggest threat to the legitimacy of 2024 elections. Benson emphasized that it was not the reliability of the voting system or cybersecurity breaches. “It’s the confusion, and chaos, and the sense of division, and the sense of disengagement that bad actors are very much trying to instill in our citizenry.”

Information and Psychology

There are many factors driving the hand-wringing over the likelihood that political rumors, mistaken information, mischaracterizations, and intentional deceptions will play an outsized role in America’s 2024 elections. Academics like Starbird, whose work has buoyed guardrails, remain under attack. Some of the biggest social media platforms, led by X—formerly Twitter—have pulled back or gutted content policing efforts. These platforms, meanwhile, are integrating artificial intelligence-generated content, which some of these same researchers have shown can create newspaper-like articles that swaths of the public say are persuasive.

Additionally, the U.S. is involved in controversial wars in Ukraine and Israel invoking global rivalries, which may entice the hostile foreign governments that meddled in recent presidential elections to target key voting blocs in 2024’s battleground states, analysts at the Aspen Cyber Summit said. And domestically, federal efforts to debunk election- and vaccine-related disinformation have shrunk, as Trump loyalists have accused these fact-based initiatives of unconstitutional censorship and sued. These GOP-led lawsuits have led to conflicting federal court rulings that have not been resolved, but fan an atmosphere of lingering distrust.

It is “a real concern for 2024: That the feds and others who monitor and inform citizens about lies and false election information will unilaterally disarm, in the face of the constant bullying and harassment,” tweeted David Becker—who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research and whose defense of election officials has made him a target of Trump loyalists—commenting after November 2023 Election Day.

What is less discussed in these warnings is what can be done to loosen online propaganda’s grip. That question, which involves the interplay of digitally delivered information and how we think and act, is where insights from scholarly research are clarifying and useful.

Debunking disinformation is not the same as changing minds, many researchers at the recent Trust and Safety conference explained. This understanding has emerged as online threats have evolved since the 2016 presidential election. That year, when Russian operatives created fake personas and pages on Facebook and elsewhere to discourage key Democratic blocs from voting, the scope of problem and solution mostly involved cybersecurity efforts, Starbird recalled in her keynote address during the conference.

At that time, the remedy was finding technical ways to quickly spot and shut down the forged accounts and fake pages. By 2020 election, the problem and its dynamics had shifted. The false narratives were coming from domestic sources. The president and his allies were people using authentic social media accounts. Trump set the tone. Influencers—right-wing personalities, pundits, and media outlets—followed his cues. Ordinary Americans not only believed their erroneous or false claims, and helped to spread them, but some Trump cultists went further and spun stolen election clichés into vast conspiracies and fabricated false evidence.

Propaganda scholars now see disinformation as a participatory phenomenon. There is more going on than simply saying that flawed or fake content is intentionally created, intentionally spread, and intentionally reacted to, Starbird and others explained. To start, disinformation is not always entirely false. It often is a story built around a grain of truth or a plausible scenario, she said, but “layered with exaggerations and distortions to create a false sense of reality.”

Moreover, disinformation “rarely functions” as a single piece of content. It is part of a series of interactions or an ongoing campaign—such as Trump’s repeated claim that elections are rigged. Crucially, while propaganda and disinformation are often talked about as being deceptive, Starbird said that “when you actually look at disinformation campaigns online, most of the content that spreads doesn’t come from people—those that are part of it [the bogus campaign], it comes from unwitting actors or sincere believers in the content.”

These layered dynamics blur the lines between what is informational and what is psychological. The factors at play include how first impressions, memory, and beliefs can clash with the ground truth—or eclipse it. Starbird cited one example she has studied. In 2020 in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, Trump supporters had been hearing for months that the November election would be stolen. When they saw that some pens given to voters bled through their paper ballot, that triggered fears and the so-called “Sharpiegate” conspiracy emerged and went viral. Election officials explained that ballots were printed in such a way that no vote would be undetected or misread. But that barely dented the erroneous assumption and false conclusion that a presidential election was being stolen before their eyes.

“Sometimes misinformation stands for false evidence, or even vague [evidence] or deep fakes [forged audio, photos or video], or whatever,” Starbird said. “But more often, misinformation comes in the form of misrepresentations, misinterpretations, and mischaracterizations… the frame that we use to interpret that evidence; and those frames are often strategically shaped by political actors and campaigns.”

In 2023, online influencers do not even have to mention the triggering frames, she said, as their audiences already know them. Influencers can pose questions, selectively surface evidence, and knowingly—in wink and nod fashion—create a collaboration where witting and unwitting actors produce and spread false content and conclusions. Additionally, the technical architecture of social media—where platforms endlessly profile users based on their posts, and those profiles help to customize and deliver targeted content—is another factor that amplifies its spread.

Starbird’s summary of the dynamics of disinformation is more nuanced than what one hears in election circles, where officials avoid commenting publicly on partisan passions. But she was not the only researcher with insights into how and where mis- and disinformation are likely to surface in 2024. Eviane Leidig, a postdoctoral fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, described another conduit during the conference where “personal radicalization and recruitment narratives” may be hiding in plain sight: influencer-led lifestyle websites.

Leidig showed seemingly innocuous pages from influencers that use “the qualities of being relatable, authentic, accessible, and responsive to their audiences to cultivate the perception of intimacy.” As they shared their personal stories, Leidig pointed to instances where influencers’ extreme views filtered in and became part of the community experience. “The messaging [is] to sell both a lifestyle and an ideology in order to build a fundamental in-group identity,” she said, which, in turn, ends up “legitimizing and normalizing… their political ideology.”

The reality that many factors shape beliefs, identity, community, and a sense of belonging means that unwinding false rumors, misconceptions, and lies—indeed, changing minds—is more complicated than merely presenting facts, said Cristina López G., a senior analyst at Graphika, which maps social media, during her talk on the dynamics of rabid online fandom at the 2023 Trust and Safety Research Conference.

López G. studied how some of Taylor Swift’s online fans harassed and abused other fans over the superstar’s purported sexuality—whether she was “secretly queer.” The “Gaylors,” who believed Swift was gay or bisexual, shared “tips about how to preserve their anonymity online,” López G. said. They anonymously harassed others. They used coded language. They censored others. Their mob-like dynamics and behavior are not that different from what can be seen on pro-Trump platforms that attacked RINOs—the pejorative for “Republicans in Name Only”—or anyone else outside their sect.

“Fandoms are really microcosms of the internet,” López G. said. “Their members are driven by the same thing as every internet user, which is just establish their dominance, and safeguard their community beliefs, and beliefs become really closely tied to who they are online… who they identify as online.”

In other words, changing minds is neither easy nor quick, and, in many circles, not welcomed.

“What this means is that real-world events do very little to change this belief,” López G. concluded, adding this observation also applied to political circles. “If you change beliefs, you’re no longer part of that community… So, it’s not really, ‘what’s real?’ and ‘what’s not?’ It’s really the friends we’ve made along the way.”

“Once you begin to see this phenomenon through that lens [where disinformation is participatory and tribal], you realize it’s everywhere,” Starbird said.

‘Counter-influencers’

At the Aspen Cyber Summit, the elections panel offered a sober view of the strategies undertaken during the Trump era, and challenges facing election defenders in and outside of government in 2024.

To date, the response essentially has been twofold. As Chris Krebs explained, “Information warfare has two pillars. One is information technical; the other is information psychological.” Krebs ran CISA—the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—during the Trump administration. He was fired after 2020 Election Day for retweeting that the election was “the most secure in American history.” As he told the audience, “It was also the most litigated election. The most scrutinized election. The most audited election. I could go on…”

On the “information technical” side, Krebs said that officials have learned to protect election computers and data. There was no indication that anyone manipulated any jurisdictions’ computers in recent cycles. But that achievement mostly took place inside government offices and behind closed doors. It has not been fully appreciated by voters, especially by partisans who do not believe that their side lost.

Instead, what many disappointed voters have seen of election operations has preyed on their insecurities—such as Starbird’s Sharpiegate example. In other words, the technical successes have been offset by what Krebs called “information psychological.” The strategy to respond to this dynamic, he and others said, is to curtail propaganda’s rapid spread on both fronts.

Some of that challenge remains technical, such as having contacts in online platforms who can flag or remove bogus content, they said. But the most potentially impactful response, at least with interrupting propaganda’s viral dynamics, hinges on cultivating what Leidig called “counter-influencers,” and what election officials call “trusted voices.” These voices are credible people inside communities, online or otherwise, who will say “not so fast,” defend the democratic process, and hopefully be heard before passionate reactions trample facts or run amok.

“All the tools we need to instill confidence in our elections exist,” Benson said at the summit. “We just have to get them—not just in the hands of trusted voices, but then communicate effectively to the people who need to hear them.”

But Benson, whose hopes echo those heard from election officials across the country, was putting on a brave face. She soon told the audience that reining in runaway rumors was not easy—and said officials needed help.

“We need assistance in developing trusted voices,” Benson said. “Second, we need assistance, particularly from tech companies in both identifying false information and removing it. We know we’re farther away from that than we have ever been in the evolution of social media over the last several years. But at the same time, where artificial intelligence is going to be used to exponentially increase both the impact and reach of misinformation, we need partners in the tech industry to help us minimize the impact and rapidly mitigate any harm.”

Still, she pointed to some progress. Michigan’s legislature, like a handful of states, recently passed laws requiring disclosure of any AI-created content in election communications. It has criminalized using deep fake imagery or forged voices. Congress, in contrast, has yet to act—and probably won’t do so before 2024. The White House recently issued executive orders that impose restrictions on AI’s use. While the large platforms will likely comply with labeling and other requirements, 2024’s torrid political campaigns are likely to be less restrained.

And so, Benson and others have tried to be as concrete as possible in naming plausible threats. In November, she told the U.S. Senate’s AI Caucus they should “expect” AI to be used “to divide, deceive, and demobilize voters throughout our country over the next year.” Those scenarios included creating false non-English messages for minority voters, automating the harassment of election officials, and generating error-ridden analyses to purge voters.

But countering propaganda remains a steep climb. Even before AI’s arrival, the nuts and bolts of elections were an ideal target because the public has little idea of how elections are run—there is little prior knowledge to reject made-up claims and discern the truth. Moreover, political passions peak in presidential years, and every election cycle has a handful of errors by workers who set up the devices that check in voters, cast votes, and count ballots. This November’s election was no exception, according to this tally of administrative errors by ElectionLine.org. After Trump’s 2020 loss, operational mistakes like these—which caused some votes to be incorrectly counted before the error was found and corrected—were misinterpreted, mischaracterized, and became fodder for his stolen election tropes. Much the same scripts surfaced after this fall’s snafus.

As crisis informatics researchers like Starbird have confirmed, doubt is more easily provoked than trust. Nor do labels and fact-checking alone change minds. At the cyber summit, Raffi Krikorian, the CTO at the Emerson Collective, a charitable foundation—who held that role for the Democratic National Committee during the last presidential election—made the same point.

“Our election system, in a lot of ways, is built on trust—like we trust a lot of the portions of the mechanics will work together,” he said. “There’s a lot of humans involved. It’s not necessarily all codified. And so, [if there is] any break in the system, it’s really easy to lose trust in the entire system.”

Krikorian, who hosts the Collective’s “Technically Optimistic” podcast, was worried about 2024. Turning to Benson, he said that his research about “where people [in Michigan] are actually getting their information,” shows that it is increasingly from smaller and more obscure online platforms. Others at the summit noted that people were turning to encrypted channels like WhatsApp for political information. In other words, the propaganda pathways appear to be shifting.

“We’re actually, in some ways, spending our time maybe in the wrong places,” Krikorian said. “We need to be spending our time on these other smaller and up-and-coming platforms, that also don’t have the staff, don’t have the energy, don’t have the people and the resources needed in order to make sure that they’re secure in the process.”

Nonetheless, the remedy that Benson kept returning to was locally trusted voices. For example, her office has stationed observers within 5 miles of every voting site to investigate any problem or claim. She said that she has been engaging “faith leaders, sports leaders, business leaders, and community leaders about the truth about how to participate and how to trust our elections.”

“AI is a new technology, but the solution is an old one—it’s about developing trusted voices that people can turn to get accurate information,” Benson said. “All of this, everything we’re talking about, is about deceiving people, deceiving voters who then act on that deception.”

But rumors, misperceptions, mischaracterizations, deceptions, lies, and violence in politics are as old as America itself, as political historians like Heather Cox Richardson have noted. There is no simple or single solution, said Starbird. Nonetheless, she ended her Stanford address with a “call to action” urging everyone to redouble their efforts in 2024.

“We’re not going to solve the problem with misinformation, disinformation, manipulation… with one new label, or a new educational initiative, or a new research program,” she told trust and safety researchers. “It’s going to have to be all of the above… It’s going to be all these different things coming at it from different directions.”

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Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, and many others.

Photo Credit: Phil Roeder / Flickr