Jones’ efforts began in 2017 with a YouTube channel, where he pitched himself as a “nationally recognized authority on border security and transnational crimes.” His one-man show, Tripwires and Triggers, lacked sophisticated production. Early videos featured primitive graphics, poor lighting, and awkward jump cuts. Many received fewer than 500 views. 

Then, in 2019, Jones landed a gig with Breitbart, a Trump-aligned media outlet that hired him to write about border security. Around that time, he met Lara Logan, an Emmy Award winner and former CBS correspondent who has become a darling of the MAGA-sphere. She interviewed Jones for her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, before being let go from Fox News after comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to a sadistic Nazi doctor.

Soon, the former lawman, despite his rudimentary Spanish, was being regularly featured as an expert on Mexican drug cartels on primetime Fox News programs, including Tucker Carlson’s show. In 2021, he became a correspondent for Newsmax, a once-fringe Fox rival that grew into a MAGA media powerhouse following the 2020 election. In June, a Reuters Institute study found that 8 percent of Americans—about 25 million—consulted Newsmax at least weekly. (That’s about the same number who report reading the Wall Street Journal weekly. Its online-only reach is similar to NPR’s, the same study showed.) 

As a Newsmax correspondent, Jones hasn’t always nailed the details in his reporting, often misspelling words and names. In one broadcast, his graphics misidentified Bubba Shelton—the sheriff of McMullen County—as the sheriff of “McAllen County” (McAllen is a Texas border city, not a county). In the title of a recent YouTube video, Jones misspelled Lukeville, Arizona—an unincorporated community on the international border and one of the state’s only ports of entry—as “Luthville.”

But, in MAGA-aligned media, it seems to be consistent political messaging that matters—not specifics. As a former DPS officer, Jones enjoys favorable treatment from the state police agency, including access to helicopters and police intelligence of which other journalists could only dream. He often features DPS helicopters, aircraft hangars, or personnel in movie trailer-style videos. In one video on his YouTube channel, Jones totes a large bundle of seized drugs on his shoulder, transporting the illicit goods from a DPS helicopter to a U.S. Border Patrol pickup. In another, Jones runs behind a state police officer, up and down boulders and through thick brush and creosote bushes—as if he, too, is part of the law enforcement team.

During many of his dispatches, Jones wears the same brown-and-black checkered scarf as DPS airmen, from whom he regularly receives intel: The division’s head pilot, Stacy Holland, texts Jones on a regular basis, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer. (In 2012, then-captain Holland was maneuvering an agency helicopter when a trooper shot at a speeding pickup, killing two Guatemalan migrants and injuring another, according to police video obtained for a previous Observer investigation.)

Most DPS officers decline interviews, instead directing journalists to the agency’s media office, which often ignores press inquiries. Holland, on the other hand, has a close relationship with Jones, often sending him photos and videos. The exchanges show that Jones has obtained access to a stream of intelligence, including suspicious activity reports, screenshots of a helicopter’s aerial view cameras, and photos of tracking devices from a DPS computer.

Jones calls Holland “bro” and praises him for his contributions, some of which are not public information. “I like it!” Jones replied to one photo. “Anything new from the field coming in lately? We should ramp that up again.” In text conversations, the two refer to migrants as “bodies,” as if they were corpses and not living human beings.

Referring to fellow human beings as “bodies” is not unusual for Jones. On a chilly December night—a few days before Christmas 2023—Jones filmed a scene from a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, where local children and families played baseball and soccer before the Texas National Guard turned it into a de facto military base for Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar, multi-agency border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. That night, the park was lined with concertina wire, its entrance was barred, and the fields were filled with hundreds of migrants, most of whom had few possessions and slept on the ground under emergency blankets. “So you got big groups of bodies that come in here about every 10 to 15 minutes,” Jones said. “Every silver blanket or bump on the ground is a body,” he added, referring to asylum-seekers. 

Jones’ access to DPS and to Operation Lone Star military activities—which serve as popular Hollywood-style backdrops for “border invasion” content creators—helped put him on the radar of Trump’s allies, including Tom Homan, who was an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration and who was recently named the president-elect’s new “border czar.”

“We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country.”

In July 2023, Homan founded a nonprofit called Border911, and he later named Jones vice president of the organization, which included other former state and federal law enforcement officers as team members who crisscrossed the country spreading the false narrative that criminal terrorists are invading the United States at the invitation of the Biden administration and Democrats. Border911 members also received government security contracts and speaking gigs for themselves or for companies that employed them, as revealed in a prior investigation in this series. The group argued that only Trump could save America, laying the groundwork for his reelection.

Jones’ DPS contacts were crucial in this pro-Trump messaging. In Border911 videos posted on social media channels and promoted at events, Jones and Homan sweep across the Texas borderlands in state police aircraft, set to a thunderous soundtrack fit for a thriller. “Whether you like President Trump or not, you can’t argue with his success,” Homan says in one video from March 2023, before it cuts to another scene: an airplane hangar in West Texas, where he, Jones, and DPS airmen in flight gear walk in slow motion toward a helicopter.

As of early December, other Border911 team members were being considered for key positions in the incoming Trump administration, including former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was tapped to lead Customs and Border Protection. With Homan as incoming “border czar,” and assigned by Trump to oversee border enforcement and mass deportations, Jones is uniquely positioned to influence homeland security strategy and messaging in Texas and beyond. 

Trump and his allies have made clear that the right wing’s most extreme ideas are now on the table, from constructing deportation camps in Texas to designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorists.” Classifying cartels as terrorists has, in Jones’ own words, been one of his goals since retiring from DPS in 2016. For nearly two decades, some Texas Republican officials have tried to convince the federal government to make this decision, but they’ve always been rebuffed partly because it would spark conflict with Mexico, the United States’ closest trading partner. 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and author of Los Zetas Inc., a book about one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels, said she does not consider Jones to be a true border authority.“He’s unknown to me. … I don’t consider him an expert,” she told the Observer. But she considers the ideas that Jones and others have espoused, including labeling cartels as foreign terrorists, to be dangerous propaganda that could well be used to justify bombings or other incursions on Mexican soil. 

In an essay for the Observer about such proposals, she wrote: “Nobody denies that extreme levels of violence and brutality in Mexico are connected with the drug trade. Something needs to be done, but deploying U.S. troops would only escalate a costly and ineffective drug war and put many innocent lives at risk.”

In the ballroom of a San Antonio Embassy Suites last October, Daniel Korus, a dean at Del Mar College in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, introduced Jones as the keynote speaker for a South Texas regional policy conference, stating that Jones had a 25-year career in border intelligence. “Now, he educates the rest of us,” said Korus, a former high-ranking naval officer.

Jones did not correct the introduction, though most of his time in the state police was actually spent in non-intelligence roles away from the border, according to DPS records. His only recorded formal DPS training course specifically on the subject was “Intelligence Gathering/Sharing/Mapping,” according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, and he took that just a few months before his retirement. 

Nonetheless, Jones promotes himself as a border intelligence expert and profits from it. With the All American Speakers Bureau, a platform for hired experts, Jones lists himself as charging $30,000 to $50,000 per speaking gig, though Korus said Jones was paid $10,000 or less for the San Antonio appearance. 

Dressed in black leather cowboy boots and a matching suit, Jones paced in front of his audience, telling tales of the borderlands and the violence between rival organized crime groups in Mexico. “What happens there is coming here, and I’m gonna show you,” he said.

On a projector screen, Jones displayed graphic videos and told stories about drug cartel members committing lurid acts of violence in Mexico: decapitations with a fillet knife, a head bashed in with a sledgehammer, and the wiping out of most of a town. 

“These people live in Texas. We have been dealing with this for many years—but you have not been told,” Jones warned, before moving to the next PowerPoint slide.

Throughout his presentation, a table full of sheriffs in cowboy hats nodded along in agreement as others in the ballroom gasped at the violent scenes. Twice, he paused to ask the audience some version of the question: “Is this a drug trafficking organization—or is this a terrorist organization?”

He told the audience what the foreign terrorist designation would accomplish: expedited investigations into bad actors that would allow police to skirt due process protections, to obtain more resources, and to freeze more organized crime organizations’ assets abroad.

“We’re gonna take this country back.”

Jones has repeated similar arguments in various venues, including a hearing of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Newsmax, the Dr. Phil show, and Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News.

To Jones, the most important aspect of the foreign terrorist label seems to be that it could enable hastened deportations for people in any way associated with Mexican drug cartels. “You can’t be a terrorist in our country,” he told Dr. Phil last year. “We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country, and go after ’em anywhere in the world, and that’s what we really need to do.”

But many of his assertions about the foreign terrorist designation—a process codified in federal law and overseen by the U.S. Department of State—are incorrect, according to experts interviewed by the Observer. Some actions Jones described can already be taken by the government without the foreign terrorist label, such as freezing assets, said former State Department official Jason Blazakis. Whether a suspect is affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization or another criminal network, individuals have a right to due process, he added.

“I think he doesn’t understand how terrorism investigations work,” Blazakis said. “He’s trying to make the designation look like some kind of special panacea.”

During his speech, Jones also informed the audience that the cartels deploy a threat, “plato y plumo”—a misstatement of “plata o plomo” that changes the meaning from a menacing choice between a bribe or a bullet to a perplexing offer of a plate and a nonsense word.

Jones emphasizes different credentials depending on his audience. Sometimes he speaks as a correspondent for Newsmax, and other times as a member of Border911. In legislative settings, he often emphasizes his DPS career, such as when he advocated designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at a press conference outside the Arizona Capitol. (Representative Steve Montenegro introduced a related bill about a week later.) 

Much of Jones’ work for Newsmax relies on strategically edited footage, meant to portray the border as a frightening place and asylum-seekers as criminal invaders.

Last January, volunteers at a humanitarian camp for asylum-seekers near the border in the unincorporated community of Sasabe, Arizona, were surprised to see Jones roll up with a cameraman. As shown in footage aired by Newsmax and separate videos a volunteer provided to the Observer, Jones was accompanied by armed and masked men from Mayhem Solutions Group, a private security firm, who flanked him as he recorded his content. The Mayhem men were mostly dressed in military fatigues, and some wore hats with patches bearing the insignia of Texas DPS Intelligence and Counterterrorism—the division Jones worked in before retiring. 

The appearance of these men in Arizona puzzled the volunteers, especially when the arrivals claimed to be part of a state or federal “task force.” One volunteer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the armed Mayhem personnel left asylum-seekers with the impression that they were police because they wore tactical vests and patches emblazoned with the word “investigator.” Those armed men said they had been hired to collect information, and they “were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency,” the volunteer said, as previously reported in The Border Chronicle, on the day the men came to the camp. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing, and that they would bring the U.S. forces in if we didn’t step aside.” 

Meanwhile, Jones continued to film, the volunteer said. “While these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country.’” 

When volunteers asked Jones about his armed companions, he provided little information. “I’m with Newsmax,” the volunteer recalled him saying. “You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” 

The Observer reached the founder of Mayhem Solutions Group, but he claimed he did not know Jones. A state contract database and public records requests show that Mayhem Solutions Group has never held a contract with Texas DPS. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about the security company employees wearing DPS insignia on their hats. The federal Department of Homeland Security stated it held no formal agreement with the company. 

In some settings, Jones introduces himself as CEO of Omni Intelligence, which he founded in 2017. The company has been described by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation as a provider of “intelligence and analytics services to government agencies and media.” Omni Intelligence has no website, and its business address has alternated between rental homes and P.O. boxes across Central Texas. (Letters sent to two of his business addresses were returned as undeliverable.)

A search of public records revealed one Omni customer: No Greater Love, a nonprofit based in Wimberley that says it educates “millions of Americans daily about the truth of open borders” and holds occasional teach-ins for doomsday preppers at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Over a two-year period, the group paid Omni Intelligence $45,000, according to its IRS Form 990 tax filings. Its website heavily features Jones’ video content. 

It is unclear if Omni has any employees, aside from Jones’ personal assistant, who lives in the Philippines. 

One of the firm’s former unpaid consultants was Ammon Blair, a recently retired Border Patrol agent. Blair was also featured in one of Jones’ YouTube videos and on Newsmax. While still at Border Patrol, Blair said he passed intelligence to Jones, and one of those stories went “viral.” 

Jones did not respond to repeated requests, via email, letter, and phone for an interview for this story. He also denied a request made in person at the San Antonio conference, saying he was unavailable that day and for the following several weeks, but that he might have time later. Jones never replied to the Observer’s subsequent inquiries.

Last April, Jones appeared with Homan and Trump at the now-president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club during a fundraising gala for Border911. As Homan’s sidekick, Jones has identified allies among sheriffs at the border and beyond, as well as other county and state officials who could support and potentially financially benefit from Trump’s mass deportation plans. 

In Arizona, Jones describes Pinal County Sheriff (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Mark Lamb as a “close friend,” and Jones once embedded with Lamb’s agency for a week. Jones also moderated a panel including Lamb and Mark Dannels, a right-wing border sheriff who has referred to deporting undocumented people as a “cleanup.” In Texas, Jones spoke at a rally with Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose department has collaborated with vigilante groups, stocked up on pepperball guns to shoot migrants, and sued the Biden administration over immigration policy. 

In Florida, Jones found another powerful ally: Richard Mantei, a state prosecutor who helped lead a year-and-a-half-long grand jury investigation, a non-criminal probe of policies to address illegal immigration. Records show Mantei sent Jones money via Venmo for “Florida expenses” last fall. (The Florida Attorney General’s Office said it lacked records of any related invoice or receipt, and it refused to release any affidavits or grand jury testimony records signed by Jones.) When the same grand jury completed its final policy recommendations, Mantei emailed the document to Homan.

In some video clips, Jones appears as Homan’s right-hand man. Homan often heralds Jones as a premier border expert because of his DPS experience. At a January 2023 press conference outside the Arizona Capitol, Homan introduced Jones as a good friend and a top authority on crime and the drug trade, after citing Jones’ DPS career.

“I’m gonna walk around the country with these men here in this organization,” says Homan in one of Border911’s signature trailers from March 2023, over footage of himself, Jones, and DPS airmen near an agency helicopter, “and educate American people on why the border is a disaster.”

At times Jones appears to have also coached DPS airmen on how—and when—to take videos so he could better use the footage. “Hey, being advised you may have up to 2,000 surging the border in El Paso bro,” Jones wrote to Holland, the chief DPS pilot, in March 2023. “Can you get some video from helicopter ASAP?” In iMessages to Holland in February 2024, he praised state police for the videos they provided. One reads: “Tell the crew great job for me. Best field production of all time.”

In a September 2023 message, Jones invited DPS to steer the narrative he portrays on Newsmax. “I’ll run it Monday,” he replied to a message from Holland. “Anything you want me to say specifically?” 

Holland and his airmen have apparently returned the favor for Jones’ flattering coverage by furnishing him with the backdrops for his propaganda videos. In one January 2024 clip, Jones and Homan walk perfectly framed between two DPS aircraft on a tarmac at sunset in West Texas, with mountains in the background.

“You know Tom, this border, it’s gotta get fixed. It’s absolutely unsustainable,” Jones says solemnly, walking beside Homan with the sunset as a backdrop, the sky painted in hues of blue and purple.

Homan responds matter-of-factly: He wakes up every morning pissed off, but at least they’ve got Border911. “We’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna secure the border, we’re gonna protect our national security,” Homan says. 

“We’re not going to get rich doing it,” he adds, not mentioning how Jones and other members of Border911 have already benefited from various government contracts and speaking gigs.

“But what a team we built.”

The post The Border Propagandist appeared first on Coda Story.

As anticipated, Trump began his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (again); withdrawing from the World Health Organisation, completing a process he began in 2020; suspending all U.S. foreign aid programs for 90 days, in part because the industry and bureaucracy “serve to destablize world peace”; insisting that it is “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and ending “the Federal funding of gender ideology.” He also unleashed a number of aggressive economic threats, potentially sparking a global trade war.

But beyond these attention-grabbing gestures designed for both domestic and international audiences, Trump is engaged in a game of international high stakes poker. At his inauguration, Silicon Valley leaders shared front-row space with Cabinet picks, visual confirmation that Trump primary allegiances are to the tech billionaires. It is these already stratospherically wealthy men, that Trump seeks to further enrich – the unseemly scramble to buy TikTok, effectively the seizure of a foreign-owned asset, being an example of how the administration and the broligarchs will work together. 

In response, countries in Trump’s crosshairs – China particularly – will reconfigure their own alliances to counter the effect of the U.S. president’s penchant for protectionism and isolationism. Tellingly, Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a widely publicized video conference call just hours after Trump’s inauguration to reaffirm their deep, abiding strategic partnership and to reform the “global governance system” dominated by the United States.

It was a strong move in the geopolitical chess game. Here's how some of the key players are positioning themselves for what comes next:

China: Unspecified Chinese goods will be subject to a 10% tariff from February 1, claims Trump. "We always believe there is no winner in a tariff or trade war," said a Chinese spokesperson in response, continuing China's tactic in the face of the U.S. president’s pronouncements of acting like the only adult in the room. If anything, by saying he would impose only a 10% tariff, Trump had climbed down from his earlier talk of 60% levies. Still, both the Chinese yuan and stock markets fell in response to Trump’s threats. Before the inauguration Trump and the Chinese president had apparently had a productive call. But, as noted earlier, the most prominent call in the hours after Trump began his second term was between Xi and Putin and their ambition to reshape the global order .

Russia: President Trump used his first day in office to issue a rare and blunt criticism of Vladimir Putin. "I think he should make a deal," Trump said about Putin's position in the war with Ukraine. "I think he's destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia is kinda in big trouble." It suggests Trump believes Putin is feeling the heat and might be pushed, however unwillingly, to take a seat at the negotiating table. Putin, for his part, praised Trump's character and courage and willingness to "avoid World War III." His chummy tone was followed through by the state-owned Russian media, which uniformly praised Trump's values as aligning with Russian values. Still, Putin's first call was to Xi, not Trump – a reminder that Russia intends to play a key role in a new global order that challenges American dominance.

Canada: It’s not just China that is Trump’s crosshairs. Also on February 1, Trump insists he will impose 25% tariffs on both Canada and Mexico as retribution for apparently letting swathes of illegals and fentanyl, the drug synonymous with the opioid crisis, cross over into the United States. The fentanyl, incidentally, Trump insists, comes from China. Justin Trudeau, Canada's lame duck prime minister, said Canada would be willing to "inflict economic pain" on the U.S. if necessary to get Trump to back off. Will Trump really begin his term in office with a trade war against America's closest allies? The European Union too, Trump says, “treats us very, very badly, so they’re going to be in for tariffs.”

India: As with Putin, Trump is said to have chemistry with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But in keeping with his belligerent post-inauguration mood, Trump threatened to levy "100% tariffs" on BRICS nations, including India, if they sought to reduce dependence on the dollar as the currency of international trade. Indian stock markets traded lower with investors nervous about retaliatory tariffs against India. But the Indian government is reportedly mulling tariff cuts on U.S. goods to placate Trump. Other placatory gestures include India indicating its willingness to take back 18,000 illegal migrants. Modi is said to be desperately seeking bilateral talks with Trump in February. Trump’s decision to end so-called birthright citizenship from February 20, thus denying babies born in the U.S. citizenship if their parents are not permanent residents, has left hundreds of thousands of Indians on temporary visas in limbo. India has long maintained that the movement of skilled Indian labour from India to the U.S. benefits both countries.  Should Modi get his longed-for audience with Trump next month, they will have a lot of tensions to address.

Trump's first week back in the White House reveals a clear strategy beneath the apparently freewheeling threats. America first, in his view, has always meant not just putting the interests of America and Americans first but maintaining America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent power. And that means eliminating or at least neutralising the opposition.

From his actions in the first week, it’s clear Trump’s mind is on China. His newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held his first meeting not with European allies but with counterparts from India, Australia and Japan - members of the Quad, a group explicitly intended to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region. While Trump builds this coalition with one hand, with his other hand he wields targeted economic threats against BRICS, a group which has proposed itself as an alternative to Western hegemony. India happens to be a member of BRICS too, though key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, which had said it would join BRICS, have postponed any such step, perhaps recognising Trump’s penchant for retribution.

Meanwhile, Putin and Xi's video call signals the possibility that Trump's return to office might accelerate the urgency to execute on their shared vision of a post-American world order. The question is whether Trump's strategy of mixing economic coercion, even against allies, with strategic coalition-building will hold them at bay or further weaken America’s global standing.

The post Trump puts the world on notice appeared first on Coda Story.

On Chinese social media, the crisis in California is being treated as conclusive evidence that US society is broken. Some of the criticism cuts uncomfortably deep - for instance, Chinese commentators have pointed to the stark divide between rich and poor Californians and how they have faced different fates after losing their homes. "Even the world's largest economy still does not have the ability to protect the safety of its citizens when disasters occur," wrote academic Lu Qi. Another blogger put it more bluntly: "So, do you know why the wildfire in the United States is out of control? Because there is no one in control. Of course, they didn’t put out the fire or save anyone"

Chinese state media drew flattering comparisons between China’s response to catastrophe and that of the U.S. government. Look at last week's Tibet earthquake, Chinese media crowed, where over 14,000 rescue workers were deployed on search and rescue operations. And remember the 2022 Chongqing wildfire, they added, reposting videos of locals transporting extinguishers, supplies and emergency workers to remote areas on mopeds to fight the fires. Writing in the state-owned Beijing Daily, columnist Bao Nan described the fires as a “completely man-made disaster.” The fire chief, he alleged, borrowing far-right tropes, “seemed more focused on LGBT initiatives.” Proclaiming the superiority of China’s governance and capacity for collective action, Nan argued that  “superheroes in American blockbusters may stir up some passion for a moment, but when facing actual disasters, we don't need solitary heroes.” What’s more effective, he wrote, is “the power of group solidarity."

Russian coverage of the California wildfires took a different but equally calculated tack. Rather than dwell on comparisons between the United States and Russia, they amplified American political conflict and the ongoing corrosive blame game. Russian state media, such as RIA Novosti, has extensively reported Elon Musk's condemnation of the California government and its supposed mismanagement of federal resources. 

Meanwhile, the Russian-appointed governor of occupied Kherson, opted for some straight-up trolling. “The California fires have left many ordinary residents homeless,” he told the state-run news agency TASS, “therefore, our region is ready to welcome any American citizen who has lost their home and livelihood. Naturally, this applies only to those who have not financed the Ukrainian army or supported the current Kiev regime, which has caused far more civilian casualties through its actions than the fires in LA.” 

What's consistently been missing from Chinese and Russian coverage is, of course, context, balance and introspection. When it comes to holding up mirrors, both Moscow and Beijing make sure that theirs only point outward. Each regime is crafting a self-serving narrative. China positions itself as the champion of collective action and social cohesion, while Russia seizes every opportunity to show the United States as fundamentally flawed and dysfunctional. What both Beijing and Moscow get is that the most effective propaganda isn't necessarily about creating fake news - it's about distorting truths to exacerbate genuine societal tensions.

What makes this type of propaganda so effective is the marshaling of selective facts and manipulation of issues that resonate with people, playing up any polarizing political implications. While we often focus on detecting "fake news," authoritarian states have mastered something more sophisticated: using social media to exploit points of conflict, appealing to users’ prejudices to effectively turning them into useful idiots. Silicon Valley's platforms have handed these states an unprecedented ability to influence communities worldwide with propaganda narratives. 

And they don’t even need to make up stories about inequality or government dysfunction. Because the most effective propaganda is the kind that is grown from kernels of truth.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here for more insights like these straight into your inbox.

The post How California’s wildfires are fuel for propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

For years, Silicon Valley's tech moguls have systematically engineered a world where truth is optional, equity and justice are expendable, and facts are toxic waste. By dismantling both fact-checking operations and DEI programs, Meta stands to save millions - with DEI programs already facing cost-cutting measures in 2023, the move shows that the only responsibility Zuckerberg appears to take seriously is the bottom line. The surprising part isn't that Meta has stopped pretending to care about anything but their power and profit - it's that we were ever naive enough to believe they did.

The consequences of this decision will play out globally, and few understand those consequences better than Maria Ressa. The founder of Rappler, was among the first to document how social media platforms enabled the rise of authoritarianism in her native Philippines, where Facebook became so dominant that it "rewired our people's brains." Ressa, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. says "propaganda is like cocaine - you take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you become an addict. And we are all addicts today." When she spoke these words at Coda's Zeg Festival last June, they felt like a warning. Now they read like a prophecy fulfilled.

Her warning wasn't just about addiction to propaganda – it was about the deliberate architecture of our digital world. "These tech companies are engineering a world without facts," she says, "and that's a world that's right for a dictator."

The Engineering of Chaos

Tech pioneer Judy Estrin frames the problem in stark infrastructural terms: "Digital platforms mix 'digital water' and 'sewage' in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy and our democracy."

This pollution isn't accidental - it's a feature, not a bug. Meta's announcement, coinciding with Elon Musk's open championing of far-right movements in Europe, reveals a profound transformation in Silicon Valley. Tech moguls who once felt pressured to champion openness and truth are now racing to shed any pretense of responsibility.

It isn't just about catering to Donald Trump and the sentiments of his followers. The shift is about how tech companies view their stakeholders. Where platforms once felt compelled to respond to pressure from employees, users, and advertisers concerned about digital pollution, they've now consolidated power solely around profits. The workforce  that once served as a guardrail for online behavior has been neutralized - a trend Elon Musk pioneered when he bought Twitter. And Meta's move to end its 'Diverse Slate Approach' to hiring and representation goals, while adding Trump allies like the Ultimate Fighting Championship supremo Dana White to its board, shows exactly where power now lies.

The Infrastructure of Authoritarianism

For years, we've analyzed electoral manipulation, documented democratic backsliding, and tracked the rise of strongmen while treating platforms as mere conduits rather than active architects of our political reality. The entire debate around content moderation appears in retrospect to have been a carefully crafted distraction – a game of Whack-a-Mole that kept us focused on individual pieces of content rather than the systemic nature of the problem. As one former Meta employee said, "It's like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier."

"Facebook's 'fact checking' initiative was at heart always a PR exercise," argues Emily Bell, whose research at the Tow Center at Columbia University focuses on the intersection of platforms, media and information integrity. "Nothing has changed about the platform's mission: to make money from the exploitation of IP and data created for free."

By abandoning civic responsibility, while disingenuously claiming to be acting in the interests of free speech, Zuckerberg and Musk aren't so much transforming their platforms as finally being honest about what these platforms have always been: engines of engagement designed to maximize profit and power, regardless of societal cost. The real shift isn't in their behavior – it's in our belated recognition that no meaningful conversation about democracy can exclude the role of the broligarchy in shaping our information ecosystem.

The Future of Truth

Tech platforms have wielded the First Amendment much like the gun lobby has wielded the Second: turning constitutional protections into a weapon against regulation and accountability. Just as gun manufacturers claim they bear no responsibility for how their products are used, platform owners insist they're merely providing neutral spaces for free expression – all while their algorithms amplify lies and fuel society's most self-destructive impulses.

And we are all complicit. The endless scrolling of TikTok and Instagram, the ease of WhatsApp communications, the ability to instantly connect with friends and family across the globe – these aren't just corporate products, they're now fundamental to our daily lives. But in our embrace of this convenience, we've sleepwalked into a future where the rejection of facts isn't just the domain of authoritarian governments in Moscow or Beijing, but of giant tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Many respected journalists and human rights defenders lent their credibility to Meta's Oversight Board – a body that could review a handful of content decisions but had little effect on the platform's fundamental design or business model. "The Oversight Board is absolutely the wrong problem [to address]," Ressa says. "They tried to call it the Supreme Court for content. Content is not the problem. The distribution and the rate of distribution is the problem. The design of the platform, none of which they have any power over. But yet they were able to get very credible people."

The Path Forward

The solutions we've pursued – from fact-checking initiatives to content moderation boards – have been mere band-aids applied on a deep systemic wound. As platforms poured millions into lobbying and institutional capture (Meta spent $7.6 million on lobbying the U.S. government in just the first quarter of 2024), we settled for superficial fixes that left their core business model untouched. As long as news organizations treat platforms as mere distribution channels rather than existential threats to information integrity, we will remain trapped in a cycle of ineffective half-measures. 

Before journalists point fingers solely at tech platforms, we should also look in the mirror - especially those of us who've made careers out of dealing in facts and telling truths. Journalists, researchers, scientists, educators - we're all part of this story. While tech platforms may at some point be regulated (though good luck with that during a Trump administration), we need to get real about our own role in this mess.

While we must figure out how to work toward systemic change, there is still power in how we choose to engage with these platforms. Every scroll, every share, every moment of attention we give is a choice. By being more conscious about where we get our information, how we verify it, and most importantly, how we pass it on, we can start reclaiming some control over our information environment. Small individual actions - from supporting independent journalism to thinking twice before spreading unverified content - add up to collective resistance against a system designed to exploit our worst impulses.

Those of us in journalism and media must also ask ourselves: Have we been complicit in providing cover for systems we knew were fundamentally broken? Have we prioritized our convenience and digital reach over the integrity of information? Most importantly, are we ready to acknowledge that our industry's survival, and arguably that of democracy overall, depends on confronting these platforms' role in undermining the very foundations of factual discourse?

The answers to these questions will determine whether we can rebuild an information ecosystem that serves society rather than corrodes it. But the very first step towards a society in which facts matter and truth has value, is admitting that the destruction of truth wasn't an accident - it was by design.

*Disclosure: Maria Ressa serves on Coda's Board of Directors.

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I was at a dinner party in California, when one guest who clearly did not vote for Trump said: “My hope is that there will be such chaos, they won’t get anything done. They don’t seem to have a plan.” 

I’ve heard versions of this analysis a few times since that dinner, both in conversation and in print, and every time it has  baffled me.

Of course there will be chaos. But isn’t that the plan? It certainly seems so now that Trump’s proposed cabinet features an alleged Russian “asset” as national intelligence chief, an alleged sexual predator as attorney general, thus leading a department that recently investigated him for sex-trafficking, and as health secretary an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who does not believe HIV causes AIDS. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense sports a tattoo associated with white supremacist groups, doesn’t believe in women serving in combat or, bizarrely, in washing his hands and has never run anything bigger than a small non-profit. These nominations are designed to cause a flurry of noise and chaos, and this has long been deliberate. 

Disruption, noise and chaos was most certainly Steve Bannon’s plan when I met him in 2019.  I had been invited to speak at the annual Eurasia Media Forum. The vanity project of the daughter of Kazakhstan’s former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the conference still managed to bring together an eclectic and fascinating group of people. I accepted the invitation mostly because I had heard a rumor that Steve Bannon was going to be the keynote speaker.  

“I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.”

Right up to the last minute, Bannon kept the organizers guessing. Eventually he showed up, wearing his signature black button-downs, one on top of the other, and gave a performance that was equal parts chaotic, thought-provoking, disturbing and entertaining. He was, I thought to myself at the time, perhaps the best public speaker I’d ever encountered. 

After the panel, Bannon agreed to an interview. The three of us – Bannon, myself and British journalist Matthew Janney who was reporting for Coda from the event – rode up the elevator to his hotel suite on the 26th floor of a glitzy skyscraper. Along the way, we chatted about gay rights and racial equality: Bannon was enthusiastically “pro” both. He told me he was worried for his gay friends who had to live in a hostile world. It was the first of many inconsistencies in his approach that we never managed to resolve.

This week, as the initial contours of Trump’s new cabinet take shape, I keep circling back to that experience, that conversation with Bannon and Matt’s insightful piece that emerged from it. 

“Revolution is coming,” Bannon said on the stage in Almaty, addressing his fellow panelists: a former EU Commissioner for Trade and a liberal professor from New York. “You are all finished,” he shouted passionately “From London to Frankfurt to Berlin, you are finished.” According to my notes, at that point the room exploded in applause as he raised his voice, drowning out the EU commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who was trying to say something in response. I listened closely to make out her words. She was saying: “Shouting is not good.” Even to those of us who agreed, her attempted intervention felt beside the point. 

Afterwards, in his suite overlooking the glittering skyline of Almaty, the economic capital of Central Asia’s largest petrostate, Bannon was friendly and engaged even as Matt and I challenged him on some very obvious discrepancies in his arguments and some ironies. Including the fact that he was calling for revolution in a country run by a corrupt elite which allowed no freedom of expression. He shrugged off every one of our counterpoints. What he wanted to talk about was the time he was spending working with the far right in Europe and Latin America. He was excited about the movement he was helping to build alongside Europe’s rising far right political stars. 

To my surprise, though, the one person he really admired, he said, was the person he vilified most: George Soros, bête noire of the global right. “I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.” 

Just weeks ago, Bannon was released from prison, where he apparently taught civics, continuing, I assume, to build that cadre. Bannon, pending further legal troubles, is now a free man and even though he is no longer in Trump's inner circle, he has a voice, a vision and a plan. A friend of mine, inadvertently, is part of this plan: he is on Bannon’s vast retribution list, the list of people on whom he wants to take revenge. 

“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call Mom and Dad tonight. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, last week.  He is excited, he says, for Attorney General Matt Gaetz to start rounding up journalists. 

Bannon built the cadres. They are in power now. And chaos is the plan.

A version of this story was published as a newsletter. Sign up here to be the first to get Coda’s stories delivered straight to your mailbox. 

Disclosure: This article is part of our ongoing coverage of the changing nature of modern day authoritarianism. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we are committed to transparency about our funding sources. The Open Society Foundations is among our many supporters. We maintain full editorial independence, and our funding sources are publicly disclosed to ensure accountability to our readers.

The post What Donald Trump owes to George Soros appeared first on Coda Story.

Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win  on November 5, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” 

The mission of Homan’s tax-exempt Border911 Foundation, formed in Virginia in October 2023, is to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. But, by promoting disinformation about a “border invasion” of “illegal immigrants,” Homan's Border911, the nickname he often uses for the foundation, is helping to lay the groundwork for challenging November’s election if the results don’t favor Trump. 

Border911 remains linked to a 501(c)(4) group, called The America Project, a major funder of election conspiracy efforts. Unlike a 501(c)(3) charity, 501(c)(4)s can legally support political campaigns, and they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” organizations because they aren’t required under U.S. tax law to reveal their donors. However, they lack one important advantage of a 501(c)(3)–their donors’ contributions are not tax-deductible. (Homan also in 2023 created another 501(c)(4) he called Border911 Inc.) 

Border911 Foundation, and its members, identified on its website, are promoting extremist policies, such as declaring an invasion at the border, to elected leaders and law enforcement officials and falsely portraying the country as beset by voter fraud, according to a joint investigation by a multistate team of journalists from Lighthouse Reports, the Texas Observer, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and palabra based on dozens of interviews, attendance of various Border911 events, and reviews of public records, videos, speeches, and social media posts. 

Border911’s policy agenda foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. The nonprofit has already had an impact in Arizona, where several Border911-backed bills have been introduced and where Republican lawmakers are pushing a controversial November ballot initiative that would formally declare a border invasion and empower state and local officials to become immigration enforcers. 

Despite his background in law enforcement, IRS filings show that Homan’s foundation and his Border911 dark money organization may be skirting federal tax law, according to tax documents and interviews with experts, that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from participating in “any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.” 

Border911 associates have testified in Congress as law enforcement experts, instead of as Trump-aligned activists, and spread disinformation in media interviews, calling the Biden Administration's handling of the U.S.-Mexico border "the biggest national security threat to the American people since 9/11." Meanwhile, these same players are securing lucrative border security contracts for themselves or for-profit companies that employ them, documents show. 

“BORDER911 is a team of operators with decades of experience,” Homan posted on X last November, announcing the group. “We helped create the most secure border in history. The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.” 

Homan’s cavalry, who are publicly featured as team members, includes former state and federal law enforcement, some of whom have intelligence backgrounds, including Rodney Scott, former Border Patrol Chief; Derek Maltz, a former Drug Enforcement Agency special agent; Victor Avila, a former agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor; and Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned NewsMax correspondent, according to public records and the Border911 Foundation’s website. 

For the last several months, the group’s members have been targeting battleground states and cities “to educate them [about the] border crisis,” Homan said on a March podcast. At a July conference in El Paso, Homan claimed that “Millions of people heading to sanctuary cities will be counted in the next census.” When seats are apportioned for Congress, he said, “That’s going to create more seats in Congress for Democrats. They sold this country out. It’s almost treasonous.” 

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in August, the gruff-talking and pugnacious Homan has attacked her on Fox News, where he is a contributor. The former federal agent, who got his start as a police officer in West Carthage, New York, before becoming a Border Patrol agent then moving to ICE, characterized Trump’s Democratic opponent on Fox as “disgusting” and said that Border Patrol and ICE agents did not respect her. She “broke the border,” he said.

From Dark Money Group to Charity 

Homan claims he launched his nonprofit as a purely self-funded passion project. “I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.” 

But before it became its own foundation, Border911 was part of The America Project, an organization founded by serial election deniers: former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security advisor. 

At a raucous White House meeting on December 18, 2020, Byrne and Flynn were part of a group of advisers that counseled Trump to use National Guard soldiers to seize voting machines to overturn the election. When martial law was not imposed, the two formed The America Project. And Byrne poured  $27 million of his own money into that project, according to a post on X, including funding a sham election audit in Arizona, and recruiting radicalized individuals as poll workers with an emphasis on those with military and law enforcement backgrounds. 

For part of 2023, Homan served as CEO of The America Project, then he launched Border911 Foundation Inc. in October of that year as a nonprofit. Homan is no longer the CEO of The America Project, but, as of June 2024, he was still listed as a board director. It’s unclear what salary and compensation, if any, he has received from The America Project.

Homan declined to be interviewed for this article, and he referred questions about Border911 to Steve Lentz, a corporate attorney in Virginia. Lentz said he didn’t know how much Homan was paid as CEO of The America Project or whether Byrne or The America Project supported Border911. “I don't know whether the foundation has received any money from them or not,” he said. Regarding the Border911 organizations, Lentz said that “Mr. Homan received no compensation in 2023, and will receive $1.00 in 2024.” 

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,”

In addition to Homan’s tax-exempt charity, IRS tax filings show that in October 2023 he created Border911, Inc, the 501(c)(4), and both organizations list their corporate headquarters as a UPS store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Both Border911 organizations also declare the same purpose in tax filings: to “educate Americans about a non-secure border.” In 2023, both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue. (The groups have not yet disclosed figures for 2024.) 

Two nonprofit compliance experts who examined Border911’s 2023 tax documents said it was unusual to see nearly identical expenditures for the two entities, while one of them—the dark money organization—reported no revenue. It appears, they said, that the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through the dark money organization, which would violate IRS tax law. “I don't have any explanation for how the (c)(4) can bring in zero money in its first year and be able to spend tens of thousands of dollars,” said Robert Maguire, vice president of research and data at the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

It would be particularly concerning, he said, if ex-law enforcement officials openly flouted federal law. “These are hard and fast rules, to make sure that people aren’t misusing nonprofits for purposes they weren’t meant for,” he said. “You would hope that someone who cares about the rule of law would care about making sure their donors have the confidence that they are not misusing the funds.” 

Lentz, the attorney who serves as a spokesman for Border911, said the 2023 tax filing for the dark money organization was incorrect. “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) that shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “It should be all zeros. We’re going to amend that 990 for Border911, Inc.” Lentz added that the 501(c)(4) was created in 2023 but not operational until March 2024. That month, ABC News reported that Border911’s tax-exempt charity appeared to be illegally backing Trump’s campaign, which Lentz told ABC was “inadvertent.” 

The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.” 

After being informed of Lentz’s statement, Maguire said: “Still, even if the explanation is more innocent, the impact can be such that it obscures their activities and makes it more difficult to hold them accountable. I certainly hope that if these were honest mistakes, they will correct them and endeavor to do better in the future. After all, these documents are all signed under penalty of perjury.” 

Reporters for this story also requested comment from five people named on the Border911 website as team members, whom Lentz said are reimbursed for expenses by the foundation.

Two members replied to questions via email–former Border Patrol official Rodney Scott and former DEA special agent Derek Maltz–emphasizing that they joined Border911for philosophical reasons and were not paid employees. Maltz said he wanted “to educate America about border security and the growing fentanyl crisis.” Maltz deferred questions about his compensation to a Border911 Foundation representative but said that most work there is on a “volunteer basis.” 

Scott said that he was “a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team.” The organization “will normally reimburse me for limited/reasonable (coach) travel,” he said and that he has “been compensated for larger speaking events that required travel and extensive time.” Sara Carter, Jaeson Jones, and Victor Avila did not respond to requests for comment by publication date. 

Border Propaganda and Legislation 

Homan has made no secret of his close ties with Trump, who promoted him to acting director of ICE where he initiated and pushed for separating families at the border before retiring in 2018. “I’m a Trump guy and not ashamed of it,” he said in a video announcing The Border911 Foundation, which Trump promoted on his Truth Social media platform last year. 

It’s unclear when Homan first met Byrne, the Overstock.com millionaire, who has funded numerous election denial groups across the country through The America Project. (Byrne did not immediately respond to an interview request.) But, in April 2023, only a few months before Homan started Border911 as “his organization,” Byrne celebrated Homan’s hire as CEO of The America Project at a fundraising event in a gilded ballroom at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “What an honor it is to be turning the command of this vessel over to a real national security professional,” he said. 

Byrne then launched into a speech. “I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,” he said. Under President Biden’s America, we are “living through a Chavista Revolution. It’s a classic Maoist doctrine coming at you in all stages,” he told the audience. “I have literally poured 90 percent of my liquidity into this effort because there is no country, no future, if we don’t win this.” 

Homan nodded from the stage. “I’ve never met a man who loves his country more than Patrick Byrne,” he said. “I’m honored that you even asked me.” 

A year later, Homan would return to Mar-a-Lago heading his own fundraiser for the Border911 Foundation with Trump in attendance. Lentz, the attorney representing Homan and the Border911 organizations, said an individual donated the Mar-a-Lago venue to Homan’s group for the April 2024 fundraiser, but he said he didn’t know who it was. The attorney also said that he had no idea how much the group had raised at the event, but that the amount would be reported in their 2024 tax filing next year. 

Prior to becoming CEO, Homan had already participated in America Project events: In January 2023, he appeared alongside Arizona state Representative Steve Montenegro, who had been serving as the America Project’s national political director, at a Phoenix press conference to promote a slate of Border911-endorsed bills, followed by a speaking event two days later with MAGA-aligned Arizona legislators, which included free entry and meals for active-duty military. 

At the press conference, the men repeatedly tied fentanyl deaths to the border “invasion,” insinuating migrants were bringing in the drugs, even though most fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens through ports of entry, according to a recent study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “This border is out of control. It's a crisis,” Homan told reporters. “Anybody who argues differently is ignoring the data, and they're lying to you.” 

“I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.” 

Two days later at a nearby theater, Montenegro publicly touted a “Border911” legislative agenda for the 2023 session that included declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations, repurposing the Arizona National Guard as a border force, allowing unauthorized immigrants to agree to orders of deportation to avoid prosecution, and prohibiting migrants from pleading down charges if they caused the death of an American citizen, mirroring some initiatives that Texas had already adopted under Republican Governor Greg Abbott. (Trump has suggested cartels be designated as foreign terrorist organizations as part of the justification for his proposal, if reelected president, to use his emergency powers to deploy even more active duty military to police the border and protests elsewhere.) 

“We’re going to focus on educating representatives and senators on what their authority is … so that we can start passing the right legislation,” Montenegro told the audience. Then, he added, “We’re going to replicate what we’re doing here” in other states “so that the entire country understands that every state is a border state.”

Montenegro introduced bills in 2023 and in 2024 that would’ve furthered Border911’s goals. Much of this legislative work coincided with Montenegro’s tenure as the America Project’s national political director, which he followed up with paid consulting work, according to state disclosure forms. Yet he never filed a personal financial interest statement with legislative officials before introducing or voting on Border911-aligned bills, a House clerk confirmed. 

It's unclear how much The America Project has paid Montenegro, since Arizona doesn’t require legislators to disclose compensation amounts. Whether Montenegro remains on the group’s payroll is also unknown, since his most recent state filings don’t cover 2024. The lawmaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Receiving money from an outside group while advancing its legislative agenda raises ethical questions, according to Paul Eckstein, a longtime Arizona attorney and expert in legislative conflicts of interest. “If he's receiving … $10,000 or more, if I were giving the advice, I would say he's got a substantial enough financial interest that he should not be involved in any way, in any (related legislative) action,” Eckstein said. 

Some Border911-backed bills have made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate only to be vetoed by Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. But Montenegro and other Republicans successfully referred the “Secure the Border Act” to the November ballot, which, if approved by Arizona voters, would authorize state and local law enforcement to act as immigration officers—even though Arizona border sheriffs have said they lack the manpower and funding to carry it out. One ex-border sheriff, a Republican, called it an “ill-conceived political stunt.” (Similar bills have previously been approved, and largely struck down by the courts, in Arizona and other states.) 

Separate Organizations with the Same Goal 

By May 2024, Homan was running the Border911 Foundation as a separate nonprofit, but he was still collaborating with Montenegro and The America Project. In his capacity as a state elected official, Montenegro approached city leaders in Tombstone, Arizona, in May and requested and received a special permit on behalf of The America Project for a Border911 “Borders and Elections” town hall meeting. Alongside Montenegro at the city council meeting was Shawn Wilson, CEO of a private security firm called Mayhem Solutions Group. “We partner with [Mayhem] them for data and intel coming across the border, not to mention with our law enforcement,” Montenegro said of The America Project’s relationship with Mayhem. (Wilson, who describes himself as an Army veteran, previously volunteered with Arizona Border Recon, a paramilitary group that claims on its website to provide intel and security services to federal agents.) 

The purpose of the event, where Border911 member Victor Avila, the former HSI agent from Texas, was identified as a speaker, would be to “sound the alarm” about the “current administration failing to do its job” when it came to securing the border, Montenegro said, according to the city council meeting minutes. “We’re trying to sound the alarm … not just in the state of Arizona, but we're trying to reach out to every state in the union.”

“I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,”

In addition to a press conference and a Border911 panel with elected officials, they would meet privately with “law enforcement intel officers and other folks that collect data intelligence,” he said. The America Project would also deliver food to local Border Patrol and law enforcement, Montenegro said, and give the local sheriff an award. 

Border911 members have held and filmed similar events in Texas, New York, and elsewhere. Team members often produce and distribute strategically edited video from the border that bolsters MAGA conspiracy theories about invasion and immigrants as criminals. Like Homan, Sara Carter, another Border911 team member, is also a Fox News contributor who often talks about “criminals flooding the border.” 

Jaeson Jones, the former captain in Texas DPS’s intelligence division, who identified himself at one point as Border911’s vice president, creates “invasion” content as a correspondent for the far-right NewsMax, and has been featured on Fox News. Those two media companies separately settled multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits with voting machine companies after falsely alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trying to overturn that election was The America Project’s initial focus, and election denial remains a major theme of Trump’s reelection campaign. 

Jones and Mayhem Solutions Group use the same video production company, Cine 48, co-founded by the media director of the far-right group Turning Point USA. (Turning Point USA is yet another 501(c)(3) charitable organization with an eponymous dark money group for political purposes.) Jones and Border911 have also regularly produced content about the border for a Turning Point USA series called “Frontlines,” as well as a mini-series co-starring Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, whom Jones has called a “close friend.” 

Lamb is closely aligned with the far-right constitutional sheriffs movement, and he is a promoter of election conspiracies, including about non-citizen voting. 

In one presentation to a Central Texas GOP chapter, Jones showed videos that he said revealed armed cartel members driving around Arizona. He attributed the footage to his firm Omni Intelligence and to Mayhem Solutions Group, and bragged of embedding with Pinal County deputies in Arizona. 

The Border is Open for Business 

The tactic of portraying the border as under invasion has proved useful for efforts to undermine confidence in the election—and has proved profitable for Border911’s members. 

Last summer, Maltz, the former DEA special agent, and Jones, the former DPS captain, testified in Washington, D.C., before the House Homeland Security Committee about the border, identifying themselves only as private citizens and former law enforcement. Jones didn’t mention his Border911 public relations role, his private intelligence company, or the $20,000-30,000 speaker fees he advertises that he charges as a border expert. 

Maltz did not disclose his Border911 speaker role or his job with a firm that has earned more than $250 million in federal government security contracts. Maltz is the executive director of government relations for PenLink, Ltd., a tech firm that sells surveillance tools to law enforcement, including software that can track cell phones without a warrant. The tech has been purchased by ICE, the DEA, and Texas DPS, among other agencies. Maltz said his job with PenLink includes interacting with the firm’s U.S. government and foreign customers, but he’s not registered as a lobbyist because his position does not involve lobbying. He said he became a member of Border911 because of his concern about Mexican cartels, Chinese organized crime, and escalating fentanyl deaths: “My work with the Border911 Foundation is completely independent of my role with Penlink. … I am a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team, but I am not a board member or employee.” 

Maltz isn't the only Border911 team member linked to a firm that’s cashing in on border security-related government contracts. Rodney Scott, the ex-Border Patrol chief, founded a consulting firm in July 2021—about a month before retiring from the federal government. At the time, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group in California filed a complaint alleging that founding the firm, Honor Consulting, while serving as Border Patrol chief violated federal law and ethics rules. (The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the complaint. The FBI and Homeland Security inspector general’s office said they could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.) In an email response to questions for this story, Scott said that prior to founding the firm, he consulted with U.S. Customs and Border Protection legal counsel, who, according to him, said there were no legal issues or concerns. When asked about the complaint, a CBP spokesperson said the agency does not comment on personnel matters. 

“He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”

In 2023, Scott incorporated a new company with a similar name: Honor Consulting Plus. Some of the firm’s customers include Republican Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil’s re-election campaign, and the Texas Office of the Attorney General, records show. 

In May, the Texas Attorney General’s office granted Scott’s firm, Honor Consulting Plus, a $50,000 contract to advise on the state's lawsuit defending Governor Abbott’s contentious floating buoy barrier on the Rio Grande, part of the governor’s multibillion-dollar militarized immigration enforcement initiative called Operation Lone Star. Scott is tasked with providing expert testimony in the case and is approved to invoice $600 an hour, with no monthly billing limit, according to the contract. Scott referred questions about the contract to the AG’s office. 

Since 2018, Homan has also had his own for-profit firm, Homeland Strategic Consulting. His Virginia-based firm registered to lobby in Texas in 2021, though state filings show no activity. Public records reveal only a handful of clients, including $32,000 to provide “strategy consulting” for failed U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, one of the 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed he had been authorized to cast the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Homan also has been personally paid $1,300 in travel reimbursement funds from Trump’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission data. 

Border911 team member Avila has focused less on government contracts and more on aspirations for public office, making unsuccessful bids for city council, Texas Land Commissioner, and Congress. A year ago, Avila launched Border Patriot PAC, which to date has endorsed a single candidate, John Fabbricatore, a former ICE agent running as a Republican for a congressional seat in Colorado. Fabbricatore, who resides in the Denver suburb of Aurora, contributed to nationwide misinformation about a Venezuelan prison gang taking over an apartment complex in his city—a false story the Trump campaign repeated. 

Otherwise, Border Patriot PAC hasn’t done much. According to its July 2024 filing, the PAC only had $19,000—of which $15,000 came from Wilson’s Mayhem Solutions Group. 

In the weeks before the election, members of Border911 have joined a final America Project-backed blitz called “Operation Restore Freedom,” giving speeches about the border along with other pervasive election conspiracy theorists in Texas and in crucial swing states like Nevada and Arizona that Trump needs to win. 

If Trump does prevail, Homan and other Border911 members may get the chance to fundamentally reshape national security and immigration policy. 

If Trump loses, Homan and his former military and law enforcement allies at Border911 and the America Project will likely be on the frontlines sowing doubts about the election for months to come. 

At speaking events, Homan sounds confident in Trump’s victory. At an America Project fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Homan said he’d pledged to Trump, as they dined together in Las Vegas, that the former president would win the November election and he’d serve under him again. “I can’t wait to be back,” Homan said. “He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”

The post Border 911: The Misinformation Network Profiting Off the ‘Invasion’ Narrative appeared first on Coda Story.

That question of whether we will be left behind has stalked this American election. Democrats claim that they are all for old alliances–though of course it was the Democrats under Obama who first signaled they were becoming disinterested in us and wanted to think about Asia instead. Today, the more Trump-leaning Republicans now openly pride themselves that they, in the words of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, “don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” They claim it’s time to think about “America first.”

But what’s at stake here is not just a geopolitical choice between Europe or Asia–a choice that has been debated in Washington for a hundred years. It’s not just a choice between being outward looking or isolationist–a choice that has been debated in America even longer. There’s something else at play, namely, what sort of country America is and what kind of country it wants to become. Giving in to Russian autocracy in Europe is intertwined with giving in to autocratic tendencies at home. The outer and the inner are co-dependent. It’s not just “us” America is leaving, it’s leaving a version of itself. 

I am not unbiased. I grew up in the provinces of the American project. I was born in Ukraine. My parents were political dissidents arrested for advocating freedom of speech and human rights in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s they were exiled, moving first to London, then Munich and Prague. They moved because my father worked in all three places for Radio Free Europe–the US Congress funded stations that aimed to help end the Soviet dictatorship–and he moved as RFE changed its headquarters. Our journey was literally inseparable from America’s mission. In this context America was intertwined with ‘the good’: in the sense of being the Superpower that here, in the region I knew best, aligned itself with basic dignity, truth and self-determination. Across the world–from Latin America to South Asia to the Middle East–America’s track record is often pernicious and often justifiably maligned. But in standing up to Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union it became more than just another shithole Superpower. It could claim to be good too–or at least better than the autocratic alternatives. 

It was the historian Anne Applebaum who first pointed out to me, on a podcast series we worked on for The Atlantic, that this projection of ‘good’ power had a transformative impact inside America as well. Being in an alliance that claimed to support democracy made America more democratic; tamed its own traditions of autocracy. You can see this in the dynamics around the civil rights movement. Part of the impetus for enacting anti-racist legislation was to ensure that America’s self-declared Cold War position as the leader of the free world also aligned with what it did at home. 

In the 1950s, Soviet propaganda was successfully hammering America for being dishonest: backing democracy abroad while oppressing African-Americans at home. America’s allies were dismayed too. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case at the Supreme Court, which rolled back segregation in schools, the Department of Justice filed a brief arguing that the law should be changed not only for domestic reasons, but also because racist laws were causing “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”

Earlier, in 1947, the Harvard professor and leading civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois capitalized on America’s claims of promoting freedom around the world, post World War II, as a way to raise the issue of its lack of human rights towards African Americans at home.

Imagine an alternative history in which America had aligned itself with totalitarian powers in the 20^th Century–Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Or what if the US had just not taken a strong position against them. It may not have copied their systems fully–but it would also have removed part of the impetus for ruling elites to deal with their own autocratic practices.

During the Cold War, Washington defined itself in opposition to the Kremlin. This in turn could have some positive consequences domestically. Now, however, what you hear in both Moscow and Washington can sound all too similar.

In the first decade of Putin’s rule I lived in Russia, and saw how Communist ideology was replaced with a new propaganda playbook. First you seed doubt in the very idea of truth, spreading so much confusion and conspiracies people don’t know who to trust. Then, you obliterate any notion of there being a difference between good and bad with an extreme relativism and a triumphant cynicism. And in this moral and epistemic wasteland you create  propaganda that legitimizes the nastiest emotions: conspiratorial, paranoid identities, and a politicized, theatrical religiosity that has less to do with ethics and everything to do with supremacist groups belonging and the desire for submission to authority and controlling others. And finally, you use all of this as an excuse to engage in strategic kleptocracy, so that the purpose of running the state becomes corruption.

Ever since Putin first fine tuned this strategy, versions of this practice have been sprouting up around the world. Moscow may have lost the global ideological race in the Cold War, but it looks increasingly like it might be on the winning side this time.

Donald Trump has always been the obvious manifestation of the American strain of this phenomenon. But while Trump embodies a post-truth, post-values worldview, it’s left to those around him to rationalize it. JD Vance is the most eloquent. Vance is a successful writer, whose memoir was lauded by liberal critics. He is one of the finest debaters in America. Everyone who meets him says he is clever, pleasant and witty. In many ways he now plays the role that Putin’s eloquent, shape-shifting courtiers played in Moscow. When Trump spread blatant falsehoods about immigrants “eating cats and dogs”, Vance argued that evidence didn’t matter and that it was right to “create stories” if they get “media attention” for what he termed the sufferings of Americans. A total disregard for evidence was reframed as a higher calling–and makes possible all sorts of rollbacks of rights and truths. It makes placing immigrants in detention camps easier. It makes denying the results of elections possible.

Vance’s explanation of why America should abandon Ukraine is also telling. Twice now Vance has made the point that there are no “good sides” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “fairy-tale mindset” to apply categories of  “good versus evil.” Each side is to blame: Russia was wrong to invade, he argues, but Ukraine has corruption problems. Everything is relative.

It’s the sort of extreme moral relativism that Moscow’s spin doctors have long perfected. It goes against what most Americans, and what most Republican voters, think. Evangelicals especially are supportive of Ukraine. But by obliterating the confrontation of good versus evil in Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine, it gives an excuse to erode the sense of right or wrong at home too. This is not about us, it’s about the US.

So where does that leave those of us who still need America? Of course it’s long past time that Europe, or more realistically North Eastern Europe, arms itself and learns to fight. The Ukrainians have shown us how to do it. But  there is no way to avoid America’s role in this fight. It’s still the only superpower that can on occasion wield a blow against evil–if it can still recognise evil.

Part of the work will be the business of skilful and grubby diplomacy. There are many reasons why America–even a triumphantly cynical, utterly relativistic America–should stand up to Russia. Economically, it keeps their main trading partner, the EU, secure. Militarily, it degrades an adversary and keeps the main enemy, China, wary of adventurism. Diplomatically, it creates a global coalition of partners. And just showing American primacy and resolve brings vast benefits including everything from trust in the US dollar to the desire of “swing countries” like India or Saudi Arabia to play along with Washington.

But if we acknowledge that the drama here is not just about its own foreign interests, but also about the battle within America itself, then the field for action becomes bigger. Standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in Russia is part of standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in America. Standing up to bullying, hate and lies in Russia is about standing up to bullying, hate and lies in America. Standing up to Russia’s mafia state turned mafia Empire means standing up to the potential of a mafia state in America.

For those of us who were raised in the provinces of the American project but now dwell or engage with its core, the aim can’t be to simply scrape and beg for security. America made us. And many of us are now literally Americans or integrated into the American conversation. Sometimes those who have come from the periphery see the issues clearer than the capital. If the center has lost its purpose, then it’s up to those who have come from the provinces to help remake it.

The post How to make M.A.G.A. mean ‘Make America Good Again’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Earlier this week, I filed entries from November 28 on, as the scale and fury of the protests against Georgian Dream mounted. On that day, Irakli Kobakhidze, the prime minister, said he was putting Georgia’s bid to join the European Union on ice for the next four years. Georgian Dream, in other words, is pushing Europe away to bring us closer to Russia.

But our country’s constitution promises to attempt full integration with the EU, a promise that Georgian Dream appears to want to break, despite its claims to the contrary. If you read my entries from November 28 chronologically, you will see that I felt motivated and enthused, thrilled that Georgians, after post-election protests seemed to peter out, were out on the streets in greater numbers, determined to assert their rights and protect their aspirations.

Since I filed those entries though, the government has adopted darker, even more repressive tactics. After arresting and beating hundreds of young protestors, the police are now using the same brutal tactics on opposition politicians. Footage of Nika Gvaramia, a prominent opposition leader, being dragged unconscious down the street by a gang of masked policemen has been seen around the world.

The violence is vicious and unrelenting. But Georgians will not be intimidated. We’re not going anywhere any time soon, so watch this space.

It’s 7.30 and I’ve just woken up. Later today, Georgian Dream politicians will open a new session of parliament, a month after a tainted election, and begin a new four-year term as the governing party of Georgia.

I head straight towards the protests outside the parliament building. Protestors have been camping outside since the previous night, even though protests in front of parliament now carry the threat of a prison sentence.

As we wait for Georgian Dream deputies (‘our’ members of parliament) to show up, we ask ourselves if there are enough of us to overwhelm the police if necessary. And will the police wait until it’s dark to take action or attack us during the day? Already, we’ve learned that we can’t impede or block the entrance to parliament and that we cannot prevent deputies entering or exiting the building.

But even this early in the morning, the police are guarding the parliament in heavy numbers. All the gates are reinforced, with metal walls erected behind them. The security measures are so extreme that even the Georgian Dream deputies - traitors - might struggle to get into the building.

Arriving outside parliament, I see the swelling crowds of protesters and feel encouraged that Georgians understand that taking to the streets in significant numbers is our only weapon. There are more of us here today than anytime in the weeks following the election. We need more, though, to join us. We want the people who sold our country to hear our anger through the walls. 

Around noon, Georgian Dream deputies arrived to bluster their way into parliament and declare the session open, even though the opposition parties had staged a boycott. As our legitimate president, Salome Zourabichvili, said, the “Georgian parliament exists no more,” since it “tore up the Constitution.”

By 1.30 pm, someone started banging on a metal wall in front of the parliament building. People rushed to join in. The noise the drumming made swallowed up all the other noises. Then some others threw firecrackers over the gate, causing loud explosions. The Georgian Dream deputies inside sure can hear us now.

Georgian Dream nominates Mikheil Kavelashvili, a 53-year-old former professional soccer player, as its presidential candidate. The current president, who has described the parliamentary elections as illegitimate, has already said she intends to stay in office until the inauguration of a “legitimately elected president by a legitimately elected parliament.” The pro-Russian Kavelashvili was not allowed to become the president of the Georgian football federation because of his lack of a university education. Yet here he is, the pick to become president of Georgia. I think it is safe to say that people expected anyone but him, a man notable nowadays for swearing at the opposition in parliament. It does make a warped kind of sense. He is the perfect puppet for a regime in which ethics and human decency are considered nuisances, a “yes man” placed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Russian-made oligarch who controls Georgian Dream, to obey Putin's every grim order.

The prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, just announced that Georgia will be halting European Union accession talks until 2028. This comes right after the European Parliament announced that elections in Georgia should be rerun and that top Georgian Dream officials, including the prime minister, should face EU sanctions, a sanctions package aimed at the top of the Georgian Dream leadership, including the prime minister. 

No more Europe! That’s basically what he is telling us. I thought they would just ghost the EU, as they have for so long, and let the relationship wear out, just so they could pretend that they were at least trying. I didn’t imagine this! I didn’t imagine that they would literally change their narrative overnight. If this is not enough to make even the most passive Georgians come out onto the streets, I don't know what will. 

I turn on my TV and see that, in fact, there are protests in front of parliament. There were none scheduled for today. But thousands are out there, more than at any of the recent protests including the one in front of Tbilisi State University in which the police arrested dozens of young people, including 21-year-old Mate Devidze, who faces seven years in prison if he is convicted on trumped up charges of assaulting a police officer.

Today, in contrast, this gathering is not organised by political leaders, it is completely improvised. People just feel compelled to come out, like we used to, until the elections made everyone hopeless. Even the president Salome Zourabichvili is on the streets, asking the riot police who they are working for – Georgia or Russia? She gets no answer. And when she asks why they won’t answer her, their commander in chief, they remain silent. 

Many Georgians have been asking whether we still had any fight left. We’ve criticised the opposition and showed contempt at their inaction. When, we asked, would the people reach their boiling point? From what I was seeing on TV, maybe we were getting there, despite the scary amounts of police and special forces with their shields and tear gas.  

I head out to the protests. The atmosphere is tense but in a good way. Undeniably, there are more people out on the streets than we’ve seen in recent weeks. And, if the police action is excessive, more will come out. That’s what everyone is saying.

Sure enough, around midnight it starts.

The police, advancing from the streets adjacent to parliament, turned water cannons on the protestors. From the very first blast it became apparent that the water was laced with something. People described feeling a burning sensation on their bodies. Many felt they couldn’t breathe. Still, soaking wet in the freezing air, their skin stinging and struggling for breath, the protestors stood in front of the jets of ‘water’. They were not afraid.

But the police were thuggish. They kept advancing, pushing us back down Rustaveli Avenue, beating up and arresting anyone they could lay their hands on. The police formed a line in front of the Tbilisi Marriott, the same location where protestors were gathered back in May, a night on which I, alongside many others, was arrested.

Tonight, I discovered that a friend of mine, Dachi, had been arrested. The police beat him as they dragged him to a police car. I called my lawyer. She was already awake, fielding dozens of calls from people who knew someone who had been arrested.  

As morning broke, the police continued to chase and beat people, to hunt down those who had taken refuge in the shops nearby. The police were brutal, in keeping with what Georgian Dream has to offer to the country.

I managed to get five hours of sleep and then went to the prison, taking food and cigarettes for my friend Dachi. His lawyer told me the police beat everyone who they arrested, some of them so badly that the prison officials refused to accept them, insisting that they be taken to hospital. On cue, an ambulance sped, sirens blaring, out of the prison gates.

After the night’s violence, as I expected, there were even more people out on the street. The police are still brutal. But the sheer number of people makes it hard for them to control the crowds. Fireworks were being thrown. And the police, under the barrage of sparks and lights, were finding it difficult to hold that line in front of the Marriott.

So many people are coming out onto the streets, it was as if the post-election lull, the inertia that took hold of the protests, had never happened. There is an incredible feeling of unity. This is our moment.

By six AM though, the police advanced once more, this time firing rubber bullets at protestors. A group of masked men were walking down Besiki Street, perpendicular to Rustaveli Avenue. Protestors were being penned in, unable to escape ‘police’ intent on violence. There were people on the ground, being stomped on by multiple officers. No mercy was shown. Women were beaten. Old people. Journalists. Children. The police were swearing at people, humiliating protestors as they beat them, seeming to enjoy their work. They seemed to believe Georgian Dream propaganda that we are all anti-national agitators backed by some nefarious combination of the EU, CIA and George Soros.

They are arresting fewer people though. Our prisons are full to the brim with protestors. On November 30, schools, businesses, and organizations around the country said they were going on strike. Videos made the rounds that showed the extent of police brutality. Georgians throughout the country are outraged. In the evening, protestors gather around the offices of TV Pirveli, the public broadcaster, demanding that the media do its job. The protestors will be given airtime, the channel’s executives promise. Later that night, I hear that my friend Dachi is being brought in front of a judge. They want to make space for new prisoners. 

The police have become instruments of state oppression, using pepper spray, water cannons, tear gas, and excessive violence to suppress peaceful protesters. Twenty eight journalists have been injured in just two days and all international human rights norms have been violated.

Still, despite all the horror, I feel positive. Georgians are refusing to be intimidated. Everyone I know who has been arrested and/or beaten, is back out on the streets.

Police violence has had no effect. Even more people take to the streets on the weekend. People are still being arrested. But there are far too many now for the arrests to make a dent. There are fewer beatings, now that so many videos of police brutality are circulating. Firework use has become more targeted and tactical. One legend even managed to rig up a homemade Gatling gun, pushing back a swarm of riot police with a dazzling burst.

Once again, though, at six am, the police make their customary advance. This time though there are fewer men in masks alongside. And as we walk away, the police aren’t engaging, aren’t looking for protestors to beat and bully. Many are speculating about this apparent softening. I just think we’re facing the B-squad, while the thugs rest.

Right now though we take advantage and walk towards Tbilisi State University, managing to occupy and block off one of the most important arteries of the city. Tonight was a win. And we’ll take it, knowing there are many more battles to be fought.

Tonight was historic. It finally felt like we were a properly organized resistance. There were more people on the streets. More medics. More people prepared for teargas. More intelligence. More fireworks. And not least, more courage.

The police, as if acknowledging new realities, became aggressive earlier than usual. Almost as soon as the protestors arrived, the police turned on the water cannons, from inside the parliament premises. At midnight, the water was replaced with tear gas. Protestors were pushed down Rustaveli Avenue, the usual tactic. As they force protestors back, more police like to emerge from side streets, beating and arresting protesters. But this time we were ready, shooting fireworks at the police and neutralizing tear gas canisters as fast as we could. There were seasoned veterans on the front lines, looking out for the injured and coordinating the crowd’s movements.

Exhausted and stretched thin, the police were less effective and on edge. They knew they were in a battle, that we were, for once, returning fire. We even used drones to help us keep tabs on police movement and organize ourselves. We understood that by being mobile, we made life more difficult for the police.

By six AM, as they have every day since the protests began on November 28, the police began to indiscriminately round up and arrest protestors. Many of those arrested, as acknowledged by global human rights organizations, have been severely beaten, their faces rearranged by the vicious riot police. 

I went home. But there were still protestors out there. On TV, I saw a miracle: police circling a group of protestors shrouded in smoke, but when the smoke cleared, the protestors had disappeared. The police, stretching down the avenue, looked confused. I almost felt sorry for them – no sleep, no arrests, and punked in view of the whole country by a bunch of kids they were trying to bully.

The protests are growing in size and scale. We need to keep this momentum, to show the authorities that we have staying power, that we will fight for our rights.

Last night, I found myself on the river bank with about 300 other people. The police have started to crack down harder. They have been arresting opposition politicians as well as continuing to beat and arrest protestors on the street. I was on the periphery of the crowd when I saw a brand new white Skoda with tinted windows, a car normally favored by high ranking police officers, being driven directly at protestors. More and more people across Georgia are coming to understand just how extreme the police violence has been. Protestors who have been released from prison have been talking about being beaten to near death, about being taken to a van far from the cameras and journalists and being tortured. Many have said that the police threatened to sexually assault them with truncheons, others have described in graphic detail the severity of unprovoked beatings. On TV, a protestor said the police put a gun to his head, threatening to blow his brains out if he didn’t unlock his phone.

Since November 28, the protests have been completely spontaneous. People feel they are in an existential struggle. That Georgia is being dragged back into the Russian orbit, even as the majority of people, especially young people, link their future to Europe and think of the European Union as a form of protection against Russian expansionism.

For obvious reasons, Georgian Dream would rather pretend the protests are organized by opposition parties and activists funded by and beholden to Western interests. So now the next phase of the crackdown has begun. The offices of opposition parties and civil society organizations are being raided without warrants. Police are going on fishing expeditions, seizing every electronic device they can. Opposition leader Niko Gvaramia was beaten unconscious and dragged into an unmarked police car. And in a bid to stop the use of fireworks, which protestors have used to defend themselves and embarrass riot police, the revenue service has reportedly closed fireworks shops and is even looking at shops that sell helmets and masks.

This government is revealing its true self and every day it’s turning more people into resistance fighters.

Luka’s diary from last month

With everyone anxiously monitoring the results of the US elections as they came in, it felt today as if I lived in Georgia the state, not Georgia the country. When it became clear Donald Trump was the winner, some celebrated, while others felt even more hopeless. Like many, I worry that Trump’s stand on negotiating with Putin could weaken the US’s position in the region, giving Russia even more of a hold over Georgia than it already has. I really hope I’m wrong.

This is an account of the last couple of days on the street in Tbilisi, as we protest the sham election of October 26. Understandably, the world’s eyes are elsewhere right now, but our battle for our democracy continues.

I'm heading to a protest organized by the opposition where they say they will show us proof of election fraud and present us with a plan of action. I'm so anxious I’m actually shivering. I really hope the opposition realizes that they need to show a united front. The doubts are growing by the day and this is probably their last chance to show us why we voted for them.  Now is the time for them to  honor the trust we put in them.

After just a couple of hours, I’m already back home. To say that the protest was a disappointment would be an understatement. Greta Thunberg might have been there, reportedly wearing a keffiyeh and expressing her solidarity with protestors at this “outrageous development,” this “authoritarian development,” but the turnout was below par. The lack of people protesting, compared to the numbers who hit the street in the wake of the stolen election, was noticeable. Morale, it seemed, was low and people were looking to opposition leaders for answers. 

Instead we got platitudes. “The plan is you.”  “The plan is to fight.” “The plan is to not let Georgian Dream steal our voices.” “The plan is to be out on the streets.” “The plan is to have real democracy.” 

These are not plans! And if the plan is to “fight,” you need a plan, a strategy, for the fight, no? For the young people out on the street, whose blood is boiling, the opposition’s words were demoralizing. Still, I’m going to show up for the protests that are being planned every day. Our protests are going to drag on longer than we would have hoped but we have to find a way to stay the course.

Honestly I feel exhausted. I'm afraid that like many others I'm going to grow cold to the situation and stop feeling anger, stop feeling anything. Already, it feels like life has been sucked out of these beautiful, bright young people, who were once so energetic and vocal. Dead inside, would be the best way to describe how we are starting to feel.

What a difference a day makes. This morning, I woke up to the news that the district court judge in Tetritskaro had ruled that the rights of voters to keep ballots secret had been violated, thus annulling results from 31 polling stations in two constituencies. The lawsuit is one of many filed by the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association and Vladimir Khuchua is the first judge to rule in their favor. He upheld their complaint that the ballot paper was so thin it was possible to read people’s votes through the paper. If the Young Lawyers Association can force enough annulments, the process would require snap elections. After Judge Khuchua’s verdict, Georgian Dream has decided to bundle all legal complaints about voters’ secrecy rights into a single trial to be heard by one judge.

Just as I was heading out to the protest, I learned that the venue had changed. The opposition wanted people to gather in front of the Court of Appeals in Tbilisi. I turned on the TV to see if we had anyone reporting from the courthouse. Sure enough, a crew from TV Formula was there, waiting for protestors to show up. But guess who had got there before them? Half the cops in the city. They surrounded the courthouse and even put a lock on the gate. A gate that is never closed. What a symbolic image that was – Georgian Dream literally locking down our courts.

On my way to the Court of Appeals, I feel much more hopeful than I did last night. Seeing our young lawyers working to overturn the election and seeing that there are judges who will put the law and their principles first gave me some energy and belief. Though it’s still a far cry from how I felt during the protests on election day. Outside the courthouse, most of the protestors were my parents' age. There were some young people, but for once we were not the majority. The atmosphere was calm. Even with hundreds of police officers walking around trying to listen in on conversations. 

At some point, we started a march from the courthouse. Where we were going, though, was unclear. I asked around and no one knew. We were just following, like perfect soldiers. I guess we were tired of thinking for ourselves. Eventually,  I managed to flag down one of the organizers who answered my question. We were going nowhere in particular. We were going to march on Tsereteli Avenue to disrupt traffic. 

To my surprise the people stuck in traffic because of us were not complaining. You could even sense support from them. What became clear to me at the end of the day was that we may have lost the critical mass, but the protests are still alive. We just need a push. We need sanctions. We need our visas revoked, and some bans on our banking system for starters. The only way to bring people back out on the streets is to make them feel uncomfortable and shatter Georgian Dream’s lies about prosperity, economic growth, and euro integration. Everyone needs to understand that over the last 12 years Georgian Dream made more money than we can wrap our heads around. The money it now uses to buy this country.

The fact that western leaders are threatening us with sanctions but are issuing none only helps to push Georgian Dream’s false narrative that they are taking the country into Europe. Sanctions might be the last hope we have left if we want to build up a wave of civil disobedience. Before, that is, they start arresting everyone who dares to speak up, and induce such fear that any change in the future will be impossible.

Luka’s diary from last month

My country officially became a satellite state of Russia. Twelve years of fighting has come to this; a Russian puppet government managed to yet again get “elected.”
These elections have seen unprecedented voter turnouts not only in the country but also abroad. And now it looks like there was some unprecedented voter fraud too.

Waking up this morning I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Months of sleepless nights spent in the streets protesting, that constant paralyzing stress you feel, seeing your country lose a war it has been fighting for over 200 years, all gone! Today, I thought, is the final battle.

While still in bed I immediately checked my phone to get the  morning news. I couldn't wait to vote! It was around  7am when I came across the first video of Georgian immigrants in the U.S driving to the voting location. The image of a U.S highway filled with cars bearing Georgian flags will live in my head for years to come. I felt so proud of my people I started tearing up. Video after video of immigrants voting abroad were coming in by the minute. Lines of Georgian voters stretching for blocks on end in major cities around the world. We were mobilized, we were together, we were going to win! Everyone in the city was excited to fulfill their civic duty and once and for all end Russian rule over our country. 

I came across the first video depicting a fight at one of the voting stations. An observer who was supposed to make sure there was no fraud at his station was getting beaten up by multiple thugs sent there to derail the peaceful processions of elections. These thugs are nothing new. For months the government has been using them to scare journalists, activists and political figures by means of violent physical attacks.

It became apparent straight away that the Georgian Dream was going to try everything not to lose their grip on power. Throughout the day more videos of voter fraud and intimidation started to surface. In one of them you could see a man dumping two handfuls of ballots into the ballot box even though observers were trying to prevent him. That voting location was shut down within the hour. Preventing hundreds from casting their vote. These were far from being the only incidents. Fraud and violation reports were coming in so fast it was hard to keep up. 

But still, everyone kept their spirits high, and remained unshaken. People believed. Restlessly waiting for the exit polls. 
Seeing how mobilized the whole population was despite all the violence and electoral fraud kept our hopes up. The fact that Georgian immigrants traveled over 2000 km to vote at their own expense because the Georgian government did not organize facilities close enough to everyone proved to us that no matter what hurdles you put in our way, we would overcome them.

When the exit polls came in, and we saw that the opposition received  the majority of votes–it felt like a turning point. Some people started celebrating preemptively. The Georgian Dream exit poll on the other hand showed a 10 percent difference more or less in their favor. Next thing we knew, Bidzina Ivanishvili had come on TV to congratulate his party on their victory. So the first images we saw on TV were both sides celebrating based on the results from their own exit polls. Imagine how insane of a sight that was, after a whole day of sitting on pins and needles, we still don’t know who won. 

The only thing left to do is wait for the count. The count comes in with 53% in favor of Georgian  Dream. Which we all know is a scam. So tonight, as of writing this we are still waiting for the ballots to be recounted manually. But we already know that Georgian Dream made it possible for individuals to vote at multiple voting stations so the manual count will still give them the advantage. 

Our elections were stolen, and we know it. A day that started full of hope, quickly turned into despair. What do we do next? Will the opposition present a plan? Do we look to the west? The west, that debated sanctions for so long that now they will hardly affect anything. Do we organize a revolution?

I guess I'll have to wake up tomorrow to see. Today, what I learned is that this was far from our final battle.

It is now day two after the election. Literally! I wrote the top part last night, feeling powerless about the situation trying to feel even for a tiny bit that I was doing something proactive. Today, I don't even know how I feel. My only thought is ’oh shit here we go again.’ Gerogians in New York, are still in line to vote, even though their voices will not be counted. Imagine traveling thousands of kilometers to cast one ballot, only to find out that in Georgia the Georgian Dream gave multiple ballots to its sham electors. It destroys your trust in democracy and in our western partners who we believed in so much. 

I'm watching TV now, eager to see a solution. And all I see is foreign diplomats condemning the Georgian Dream without actually proposing a solution. They are still talking about how a government should not act in this way and that the Georgian Dream needs to take back the results. Moscow doesn't care when you wave a finger. And of course a government should not act this way, but telling them will not change anything. They need to be punished and we need your help to punish them. But still, the only thing we hear from our partners is their shock and outrage. 

Georgia should be an example and a warning to the western leaders, diplomats and policymakers. And hopefully make them realize how little they understand about the power dynamics within the post Soviet space. The balance you once knew is now on the tipping point. You in the west need to listen to your Ukrainian and Georgian counterparts when it comes to Russia because who knows it better than us? You, who live thousands of kilometers away or us the people Russia has tried to subdue for over 200 years? You take time to discuss every single move while Russia acts! That's why sanctions now are 100 times less effective than they would have been 6 months ago. It is time for new diplomacy. A more firm diplomacy. A more active and understanding one. One adapted to the ever-changing modern geopolitical space. Because you can't continue looking at the post Soviet space with the same optics you use to look at your actually democratic countries. When western diplomats talk about Georgia the only point they are conveying is how shocked they are that democracy is not working here. You have to understand that the fight we are leading is for our society to function as democratically as yours. This is something many westerners take for granted. But we have to fight for it. And your inadequacy to act helps further propagation of the Russian narrative about the powerlessness of the west. In hindsight the west should have realized this with their semi useful sanctions against Russia at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.

Please realize that you are actually gambling with real peoples lives that believe in you, and have given you their trust, in Ukraine and in Georgia. You need to prove that the west still holds the power of change. The same power that has been the cornerstone of democracy around the world since WW2. Time for debates, promises and threats is over. It is time for action!

We are back in front of the parliament. Why? Because our elections were rigged and we came out to see what the opposition leaders had to say. I got to the protest at 19:30 and immediately felt something was off. All the previous protests had some kind of electricity in the air, but this time it was different. An unusual mix of fatigue, anger and silent despair. I have never felt anything like this before. All the Gen-Zs who previously were all about peace now wanted to “fuck shit up” even though they all knew that today was not that kind of protest. The closest they got was when they heckled Viktor Orban the Hungarian Prime Minister on his exit from the Marriott Hotel on Rustaveli Avenue by calling him a dick in his own language. He was on an official visit to congratulate the ruling party on their win in the elections.

The first speaker of the night was our president Salome Zourabichvili who was then followed by all the members of different opposition parties. Her speech gave very little hope to our constantly growing desperation.

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But empires are also built from the margins, and no one knows this better than Vladimir Putin. 

This week, Putin scored a huge geopolitical victory when the party the Kremlin was rooting for in Georgia pulled off a seemingly impossible electoral win. 

 “Georgians have won. Attaboys!” posted Margarita Simonyan, head of RT and the Kremlin’s chief propagandist on X. 

“I woke up in Russia. How can I go back to being Moscow’s slave?” a devastated friend texted the morning after the vote. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party, run by an oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili secured a parliamentary majority. Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, earning in the process the nickname “anaconda” for being methodical and relentless at eliminating rivals. 

He moved to Georgia shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and became one of the country’s most impactful philanthropists. He supported culture and arts, paid for hospitals, kept the entire Opera House on his payroll and stepped in every time the government’s coffers didn’t stretch far enough to pave a road or build a school. He was also a recluse, until in 2012 when he set up the Georgian Dream party and scored a landslide victory against Mikhail Saakasvhili, Georgia’s former president whom Putin famously promised to “hang by the balls” and who is currently in jail in Tbilisi.  

Since the 2012 victory, Ivanishvili has been methodically moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit:  covertly and slowly at first, openly and aggressively in more recent years. 

This caused a lot of friction with the society: Georgians had tired of Saakashvili’s government, which was becoming autocratic, but many were set on a turn towards Europe. For centuries Georgian luminaries have cultivated the idea of Europe as the way of protecting the Georgian language and identity from oppression by its neighbors. The modern Georgian constitution calls for a closer alliance with the west, in particular the EU and Nato. The country’s entire cultural identity is built around the story of struggle against historic oppressors: Persians, Ottomans and, for the past two centuries, Russians. 

By the time Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Georgians were disillusioned in Ivanishvili but they were still shocked when the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv. Ukraine had stood by Georgia through all of its wars, including the most recent Russian invasion in 2008. The government’s position felt like a betrayal. 

But then the Georgian Dream went even further, passing some of the most repressive Russian-style laws, launching brutal crackdowns on activists, targeting the LGBTQ community and unleashing dirty disinformation campaigns straight out of the Kremlin playbook. By 2024, hundreds of thousands were taking part in regular anti-government demonstrations led by the youth demanding that Georgia stays on its European course. 

This election, the only democratic way of getting the country out of Ivanishvili’s and Russia's tightening embrace, became the most pivotal vote in the country's history since the independence referendum in 1991.  Polls, including traditionally reliable exit polls, put the opposition in a clear lead. On the day of the vote, the turnout was so high that in some polling stations people queued for hours to cast the ballots.  

And yet, the Central Election body announced that the Georgian Dream party beat the country’s pro-European opposition and secured a fourth term. “This seems to defy gravity,” a friend in Tbilisi commented.  

In the next few weeks, the opposition in Georgia will work to galvanize supporters and try to prove that the election was stolen. The list of recorded irregularities is long, and include suspicious discrepancies in numbers, violence and ballot stuffing. Despite the evidence, fighting for justice in courts controlled by an oligarch is likely to be futile. 

The opposition also faces the reality that the Georgian Dream did perform better than anyone has expected, in part at least thanks to an aggressive pre-election campaign that focused on fear: the governing party’s singular message equated opposition with another war with Russia.  Their campaign included billboards that juxtaposed ruins of Ukrainian cities with peaceful landscapes of Georgia.  It proved effective in the country, where Russia still occupies 20% of the territory and memories of the 2008 invasion, as well as previous wars,  are very much alive.

The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. For this is not a story of a rigged post-Soviet election, but rather the story of a larger, systemic game that has been rigged against us all. 

Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology, and selective violence have all eaten away at the foundations of all societies. These interconnected trends, often obscured by the noise of our news cycle, are part of a larger authoritarian web that is enveloping the globe, and polarizing our communities from within. Connecting the dots between them reveals a pervasive threat that extends far beyond any single event.

In this rigged game, the losers aren’t just the Georgian opposition and their supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom: whether it is the freedom to speak out without being beaten or imprisoned, or the freedom of a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate. The real winners aren’t the Georgian politicians or even the oligarch who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above shared values. 

In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, who has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy.  Ahead of the US elections, there is a warning here too. Georgia has always been the place where the Kremlin has rehearsed its global playbook. 

Throughout the 1990s, it was in Georgia  that Moscow ignited wars and transformed them into frozen conflicts, a precursor to the tactics later employed in Ukraine. As Putin’s Russia grew more assertive, it occupied territories and meddled in elections, using methods that would then spread to Europe and the United States.

It was in liberal, progressive Georgia, where the Kremlin first piloted anti LGBTQ+ narratives, teaming up with the members of the American and European religious right and carefully targeting traditional parts of the society and testing ways to spin marginal homophobia into a larger culture war that  eventually took root in the West. 

Yet, for all the lands Putin has seized and the narratives he has spun, his true success hinges on two tools handed to him by his own adversaries in the West. The first is our information system that is fuelled by social media platforms, which are run on profit-driven algorithms built to spread disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. The second–fueled in part by the first–is the dwindling attention span of those who can and should want to help.

Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed, unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention. And yet, the reason empires crumble from the margins is because true resistance always comes from the edges. Helping Georgia bring back its democracy will keep it alive elsewhere.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Guardian newspaper.

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In Moldova, the pro-European president failed to secure victory in the first round, but the referendum, which will enshrine Moldova’s pursuit of EU membership in the country’s constitution, narrowly passed with 50.38%.  

In Georgia, the country’s pro-Western path is already ingrained in the constitution but the ruling Georgian Dream party, led by a pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has turned increasingly anti-Western and threatens to reverse it. Tens of thousands of protesters waving EU flags in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, worry they are about to lose the promise of independence that generations prior have fought and died for.  

“The subsequent days and possibly weeks in Georgia is something that sometimes generations pass without experiencing. The quest to save your country is a terrifying responsibility, a debilitating endeavor, a great privilege, and an unparalleled sense of fulfillment,” writes opposition supporter Marika Mikiashvili.

Polls have consistently shown that around 80% of Georgians want the country to join the European Union and NATO. The ambition of being part of the European family is seen as the only way to protect Georgia from Russia, whose military already occupies a fifth of Georgia’s internationally recognized territory.

The results of the second round in Moldova and the upcoming Sunday election in Georgia are also part of a larger context determined by the election cycle in the US. The U.S. election result will have a direct effect on the war in Ukraine, which in turn determines the future of the entire region. Moscow is cheering for Trump. This week, the Russian state media widely quoted former president Medvedev who praised Trump as “the most significant US figure to admit Vladimir Zelensky’s responsibility for the Ukrainian conflict” 

Zooming out: Left and increasingly far right-leaning forces in the West often argue that Russia should have the control of their backyard and that Washington and Brussels need to stop interfering in the region. This argument is in itself colonial: just like in Ukraine, Moldova’s and Georgia’s fight for independence is also the fight against historic racism and colonial attitudes aimed at non-ethnically Russian people who have been forced into the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Read this piece for context.

Connecting the Dots: Georgia and Moldova (as well as Ukraine) are where the Kremlin mastered its election interference skills, including the strategies used in the 2016 election in the US. Tactics like mechanisms of vote buying or hacking, used by the Kremlin are often adopted by authoritarians elsewhere. Paired with an information system built to manipulate and spread lies, such tactics erode democracy worldwide. Some of the more egregious tactics used in elections in Moldova and Georgia include: 

• Open vote buying: The Kremlin has been openly paying voters in Gagauzia region of Moldova, a region known for separatist sentiments. 
• Voter fraud scheme: a large-scale scheme that involved $15 million being transferred to 130,000 Moldovans, financed by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, who currently resides in Russia. According to Moldova’s incumbent president, 300,000 votes were bought, plenty to sway an election in the country.
• Pushing Fear: the pro-Russian side launched a propaganda campaign that has framed Moldova’s EU integration as a path to war with Russia. This tactic has been effective in influencing votes, with pro-Russian figures promising to shield Moldova from conflict in exchange for abandoning its EU ambitions.

Fear has been a big weapon for the anti-EU side in Georgia too. The ruling party uses posters comparing bombed sites in Ukraine to newly constructed buildings in Georgia, suggesting that without their leadership, Georgia will face a similar fate. 

Already, the alarm bells of autocracy can be heard: foreign journalists looking to cover the decisive election are being denied visa and entry by the Georgian Dream. In what definitely does not seem like a coincidence, the campaign video for the Georgian Dream is a direct lift of Putin’s 2018 election video. 

Bloomberg recently uncovered documents revealing the scope of a previously unknown Russian cyberattack on Georgia ahead of its 2020 elections.Between 2017-2020, hackers infiltrated the country's foreign and finance ministries, other government departments, central bank, key energy and telecommunications providers, oil terminals and media platforms.One of the goals of the attack seemed to be obtaining the capability to tamper with Georgia’s vital infrastructure services in case the election results were not seen as favorable for the Kremlin.

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

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Nishita Jha: Doctor Saha, why do you think we are obsessed with cults and how did your own obsession with cults begin? Relatedly, why do you think they are a source of such deep fascination in the world of books and cinema and streamers? 

Poulomi Saha: I think cults are much more than just a pop cultural phenomenon, they are a phenomenon that has seeped into all parts of our life, popular, political, social and psychic. The class that I started teaching during the pandemic [Cults in Popular Culture] began because, like many other people, I was spending my days and nights watching docuseries and listening to podcasts on cults. In some ways, it was one of the singular forms of feeling connected to other people. I was getting a little concerned for myself and I was pretty surprised to see myself giving up on my own, long held, sometimes innate reactions to cults. In some ways, the class was an attempt to make sense of this with hundreds of other people. Around me too, I saw the attention and obsession with cults getting more fanatical. It seemed like it was time to move this kind of social analysis outwards.

NJ: One genre of TikTok videos I know your students keep sending you is “What would it take to get you to join a cult?” and it’s a question that’s been memed and stitched by millions of users — a mini-cult of people who love cults on Tik-Tok, which is a platform that spawns its own consumer cults of Stanley Cup users and beauty treatments and such. Did writing your book make you more aware of the many cults that surround us today?

PS: The meme on Tiktok you’re referring to is fascinating because you also have this remarkable effect that in the repetition (through stitching the videos) you are producing a structure that we might actually call cultic: to participate in this imagination together. In the meme, someone says “Would you join a cult if they offered you a free lunch?”, you respond “Well, I would join a cult. I don't even need the free lunch. I would take a donut.” But what is really happening is that the two people now have something in common. They are repeating the same words back to each other so that they recognize that they think in the same ways, they are announcing an affiliation to each other, and that is a powerful thing. Memes are a really interesting and new vehicle to produce a kind of group think. I'm trying very hard not to pathologize it or to suggest that memes are hypnotizing people into mindless repetition or some hypnotic state. I actually think the repetition is actually a way to articulate a long standing desire to simply be like other people. So we see a kind of second form of sociality being produced here in social media, and we also see it in the world of politics. 

NJ: How does that need for belonging play out in American politics? 

PS: I live in Northern California — so I am in some ways, at the epicenter of a particular version of the cult phenomenon. I have a theory which I'm delighted to have proven wrong, that America is a unique place when it comes to cults. America in its vision of itself as this great open space which drives the settler colonial fantasy, has long been obsessed with newness. Americans have really envisioned themselves as a new man, long before the advent of something called the State of the United States, and well into the early part of the colonial project. That fantasy is so compelling and it stretches to all parts of American life, from politics to economics to society. And what it gives birth to is a really unique phenomenon, where we say this is the only place where newness is celebrated as innovation and it's not condemned as heresy.

In most other societies, if you announce the advent of a new messiah it's not just that you're going to have, like, local resistance. There are often overarching religious and/or social and political structures that will limit this. I mean, imagine a new messiah announcing their advent in Italy. It's hard to imagine, right? 

NJ: I see what you mean, in that there is almost a uniquely American obsession with what the era-defining Big New Thing will be, in culture and spirituality, tech, health and of course politics.

PS: We see the ways in which these kinds of things flourish outside the mainstream. What popular culture has done has brought the outside, the fringe, not just into the mainstream, but literally into our homes. We're watching, we're listening, we're obsessing on the internet, and this is where I think we're seeing a new vision of what cult culture is. When you have people who watch a docuseries become quite obsessed, what do they do next? They're not largely going out and joining these groups in the world. Instead, what they are doing is joining subreddits. What they are doing is getting on social media and producing Tiktok, what they're doing is actually trying to reproduce the feeling of being fully immersed with other people.

Along with the invitation to newness, at the same time it is also a highly normative conformity seeking culture. So you have powerful guardrails in place that would claim to keep most people outside of these radical choices, these insular groups, these new religious movements, except the more powerful the guardrail, the more powerful the interdiction, the more powerful the draw. 

NJ: How does the cult of personality shape American politics? What we see now is this almost perfect and uncanny merging of political leaders with social media and reality TV. They are characters with narrative arcs and followers, we watch whether we love them or love to hate them. 

PS: The cult of personality is so interesting because there's a way in which it operates is a totally different thing than social cults, but they do have a couple important things in common. The term “cult of personality” actually comes out of the Romantic period where Immanuel Kant spoke about the cult of genius — that there was a way of thinking and being in the world that should make you exceptional, and that exceptionality was singular in your mind, but always producing a kind of collective. The cult of genius was about finding these figures who had a particular kind of understanding of clarity of the world, a kind of philosophical elevation and becoming their followers. Now, when you become a follower, of course you never become the genius. Within the cult of genius, there's only one genius, and you have inside these followers who go looking for profound truth….

You think about charismatic leaders, whether they are charismatic figures like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, but also Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King … you cannot know how a person comes to have this kind of power. Again, they aren't faster, stronger, necessarily smarter, and yet when they speak, you feel yourself elevated, transformed, transported. When you have a kind of charismatic figure, so much of the power comes from the fact that they will often tell the story about themselves, a kind of self mythologizing in which they'll say things often like either I am an ordinary person or I was born ordinary. My parents were normal. They were working class, middle class. I had no silver spoon. I had no great grace from on high. What I am before you is utterly ordinary. And of course, as they say it, their effect is so extraordinary that it really kind of burnishes this image of magic, of something you cannot explain and you cannot touch, and it is so compelling. What happens is they begin to develop a following, and the followers all recognize that they witness the extraordinary in this figure. 

So you feel as though you are in the presence of the Divine and all around you when you go home and you're talking to your family when you go to work, you're trying to describe the inordinate force of this person. And people are like — that person? They're a buffoon, they're not very smart, they're not very successful, they're not a real billionaire. That dissonance, rather than breaking through the mind of the follower, actually solidifies the sense of a kind of magical capacity that the charismatic leader has.

Now the follower is also imbued with it because they believe they can see the truth that no one else can. It produces a kind of fanaticism. If you believe that you have access to a new kind of messianic figure and people all around you don't see it, it is very easy to begin to feel like you too are chosen. You too have a kind of special capacity.

It's incredibly compelling, and especially for people who have historically felt as though they're disenfranchised or that their birthright has somehow been taken from them, to have it resurrected. I mean, that's a pretty good compensation to having felt kind of economically disenfranchised for a couple decades.

NJ:  You may not have the answer, but I wonder if that also produces a profound alienation from the rest of the world that doesn't get it. I'm thinking of politics, of how easily groups that are fanatic, or disenfranchised can become militarized or turned into violent mobs. Is the leap from one to the other made easier through disinformation and mass media, and how easy it is to spread the word of the messianic figure?

PS: It does produce a kind of alienation, and I think that there are many different ways that people cope with that. A lot of mass media really flattens the experience of it, we've gotten very good at diagnosing not just misinformation, but a kind of misunderstanding in the followers of these charismatic figures. Here I am really profoundly thinking of Donald Trump. You'll see again on social media, the phenomenon of young reporters, usually lay reporters who go to these Trump rallies and they try to catch the follower in a kind of gotcha moment, to sort of reveal the fundamental cognitive dissonance in a MAGA believer.

So they'll say things like, now, how do you feel about the fact that Joe Biden didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs? And you'll have a person who's like, “He's a coward! He's a disgrace! He cannot be commander-in-chief.” And then the reporter will say, oh, I misspoke. I meant to say Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs, and then the follower will say, “Well, you know, my father had dropped arches. It was so painful, and that's a real danger, not just to himself, but to his platoon.” This is actually a video that I watched recently, and of course, as the viewers watching this on Tiktok or on Instagram we are supposed to laugh. We're supposed to think —  look at this sad, pathetic person who doesn't even see that they're being conned.

It is really satisfying for those of us who believe that we see the truth. We see beyond the smoke and mirrors, but it doesn't allow us to actually contend with what is happening individually to those people, socially, within that group and as these people live in the world.

But it is not possible that the people at the MAGA rally are totally unaware of the gap between what they say and what they believe. But you have to find some kind of compensation. People do that by refusing information that refutes their beliefs and surrounding themselves with people who share those beliefs. So the phenomenon of the Trump rally is important, it becomes a place and time where you get relief from the barrage of being told no, you're not right, you're wrong, not true, not good. In the space of that rally, everyone around you is saying, yes, they're saying you're not crazy, you're not stupid, you're not being manipulated by someone smarter than you. Community is bound together by so many things, including a mutually reinforcing truth, and that truth becomes more and more potent.

NJ: I’d like to go back to what you said about the American obsession with newness, but also that it is a society that is conformist, or wants to protect the old, in a sense. You see that tension play out with the candidates right now, where someone like Harris must always find a way to balance the fact that she represents newness — there’s never been a US President that looked like her — with someone like Walz, who fits into the American ideal of an older, white patriarch. If you had to make a guess, will America choose the new or the old? 

PS: I do think that you are putting your finger on the pulse of something that really underpins a lot of this conversation around cults of personality and politics. Think about the MAGA project — Make America Great Again is about a return to a prior moment again. At these rallies, you have people being asked, When was America great? And the way in which they're struggling to find a moment is telling — it's always a moment before they were born, always a moment of a kind of mythic abundance and freedom, the 19th century or the industrial revolution. When you press on it and say, well wasn't that before women had the right to vote, or wasn’t that an era of racial segregation … you realize that the actual moment matters much less than the fantasy that there was a kind of reparative moment in America's past where the new man had all of this abundance before him.

Donald Trump, for a non believer, is a terrifying, sometimes funny, but a kind of monstrous figure. For his believers, he is a prophet, and he is a prophet who is able to see more clearly than anyone, a moment where America was great and return us there, with a kind of future oriented promise.

What we also see in world history across multiple generations of world leaders is that charismatic authority is never correct. When they die, or there's a transfer of power, the next leader is either a failed charismatic leader. That is, they cannot reproduce the same intensity, or they're a bureaucrat.

Many political scientists have been speculating on what will happen if Trump does not win this election. If he does not win this election, will Trump fade away, but Trumpism continues to flourish? What many liberal theorists want to believe is that the cognitive dissonance will be revealed. That Trump’s followers will think, “Oh no, I've been following this fraud and con man all along. I see clearly now I repent. Let me be reincorporated into this rational state.” I don't know what will happen in the election, but I do think that the latter is very unlikely to happen. I don't think that even if Trump loses, we are going to see the skies parting and the light of knowledge falling on the dark minds of MAGA. I think his influence has drastically changed what it is possible to do in American politics, and there are too many smart, canny, charismatic political figures in the machine who will want to capitalize on the fact that people are clearly hungry for that feeling of being together, believing in this impossible thing that on the outside is being laughed at, but where you know you have access the truth and freedom and Liberty. I mean, that's what drives American politics, rhetorically, at the very least. 

Dr. Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and co-director of the program in critical theory. They are currently at work on a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the gripping curiosity and fervent disavowal of what we do not ourselves inhabit or experience and yet cannot shake. We aren’t simply frightened of or repulsed by cults. There is a powerful draw to these groups, to the possibility of utter self-transformation. At its heart, the book FASCINATION is interested in how cults reveal what we truly hunger for—spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally. Not just for those who join but for all of us who believe we never would. In FASCINATION, Saha explains why we love, hate, and love to hate cults—why we can neither lean in nor look away.

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As a kid, I always bubbled with energy too. I talk at triple speed, and people often have to tell me to slow down. My childhood neighborhood, the Abanotubani district, lies beneath a great gorge in Tbilisi. A huge, ruined fortress overlooks our neighborhood —- for centuries, it served as a stronghold for Tbilisi, protecting it against invaders.

Now, views of the fortress are obscured by an even bigger mansion, built by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in our country. His wealth is about a third of our gross domestic product. Construction on his house began when I was a toddler: a great sea of glass and metal dominating the gorge. I remember looking up and thinking it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. 

Ivanishvili became the biggest philanthropist in Georgia, supporting arts and culture, fixing schools, houses and hospitals. But even as a young kid, I was doubtful that some billionaire was truly going to help our country. 

Protests were the backdrop of my childhood in Georgia. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders during the Rose Revolution. I was three. It was a peaceful uprising to oust the then-President Eduard Shevardnadze, ending his reign of chaos that had lasted more than a decade. A man called Mikheil Saakashvili was elected after him and set about trying to rid the country of the corruption that had plagued it for so long. 

While there were problems during Saakashvili’s rule, there was also a huge shift in the country towards democracy and reform. For a while, things felt hopeful. 

Of course, we always lived below our powerful billionaire neighbor — the oligarch Ivanishvili in his spy villain-worthy lair. But I also grew up being aware of another big neighbor, one that sat right above Georgia. On a clear day in the hills above my house in Tbilisi, you could see the Greater Caucasus mountain mange — the natural border with Russia.

I was on vacation in those hills above Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. I remember the warplanes buzzing overhead and how my mom went into a panicked frenzy. During that war, Russia occupied South Ossetia, a region to the northwest of Tbilisi. I guess that was when I started to absorb the idea that Russia was not our friend. 

When I was 12, a party called Georgian Dream came to power, backed by Ivanishvili, the billionaire who lived above us. Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs from the former Soviet space, has close ties to Putin. My parents felt uneasy about it all and moved the family to Paris, where I spent my teenage years. 

We lived in the bougie 6th arrondissement. Kids at my school had no idea where Georgia was — I was constantly having to explain that I was from the country, not the U.S. state. The country by the black sea — “la mere noire,” I would intone, again and again. It was Georgia for dummies. People would nod, not quite knowing. One girl literally thought Georgia was a place in the Arctic region of Lapland. If I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, I guess she was thinking of the island of South Georgia in Antarctica. Wrong again. I realized it was often easier to just pretend I was French like everyone else. 

As I grew older, though, I became prouder of my roots. I found a group of friends who came from all over. They introduced me to an important part of French life: going to protests. At those protests, I learned a lesson — my voice matters. 

The French really put the “pro” in protests — they do not mess around. While I was in high school, the cops killed a French activist with a police grenade during a protest. It caused uproar across the country, so I tagged along with older kids to blockade our school, barricading it with trash cans for two weeks to push for justice for the guy who was killed. 

I started to learn that protest actually works in a democracy. I would go between Paris and Tbilisi, taking lessons from my French friends and bringing them to Georgia. “You guys go home too soon when you protest. You stand there and think stuff is going to fall out of the sky,” I would tell my Georgian friends. Last year, though, a new law was proposed in Georgia, and things went full chaos-mode. 

It’s called the foreign agents law. It’s a copycat of the same regulation in Russia. It dictates that any institution getting 20% of its money from abroad has to register with a statewide system as an agent of foreign influence. 

In practice, it makes it easier for the state to crush opposition, get rid of foreign-aided projects that make our life better and stamp out free expression by creating scapegoats. It gives the government arbitrary reasons to arrest anyone they deem a “foreign influence operation.” 

Loads of my friends in Tbilisi work on projects that would be deemed a “foreign agent” by this new law. Whether they work in plastic recycling programs, as independent journalists or as human rights lawyers, they now face extra interrogation by the state. It’s basically a tool for political repression. 

The law’s proposal last year lit a flame under us in Tbilisi. We organized big protests and for a while, it worked — the government didn’t press ahead. But this year, they tried again. 

On April 3, the Georgian Dream party announced plans to bring back the bill. I felt a mixture of anger and hopelessness when I heard. Here we go again, I thought. Here’s undeniable proof of our government blindly trying to follow Russia's lead. I got ready to fight. 

Maybe if you had the privilege of growing up in a first-world country, you don’t understand, but for us this law means the difference between having a functioning democracy and existing as a puppet for Russia. It means losing our freedom of speech. 

On the morning of April 15, the protests began. 

My friends and I have joined the demonstrations every day, trying to put the lessons I’d learned in France into practice. I believe that if we can inspire enough people to get out on the streets, we can overwhelm the brutality we are fighting against. For now, the state is fighting back hard, with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and by simply beating protesters to a pulp. I’m worried things are going to descend into even more violence, though I hope we can avoid it.

On the night of April 30, I put on a gas mask and assigned myself a task: deactivate as many tear gas canisters as I could. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can put a plastic cup over the canister before it starts to smoke, which snuffs it out. Or, if it’s smoking already, you can dunk the canister in a bucket of water.

Things escalated fast that night. Protesters surged onto Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and as they did, police unleashed a torrent of tear gas canisters onto us from the side streets, scattering the crowd. I ran forwards into the impact zone, grabbing the canisters and submerging them into bottles of water that I had previously set out. It was a race to get to the canisters before they started spinning out of control. 

The police began advancing from the side streets and blasting everyone in the area with water cannon, throwing them to the ground. They didn’t care if they hit protesters or journalists — and they hit both. Officers also beat up anyone they could get their hands on. A no man's land emerged between the protesters and the police. In the buffer zone were journalists — and me. Along with dealing with the tear gas, I was also taking pictures — using loads of flash to annoy the officers — just for my own personal project. I managed to capture several instances of how police laid into the protestors. 

It was time to build barricades, French style, and invoke the lessons I had learned in Paris. I started dragging metal barrier fences together and getting people to help. I then told people to gather up trash cans, just like we did in high school. Five guys started to help me. From that moment on, I was standing in the buffer zone in front of the barricades, directing people like an orchestra conductor. I got them to add umbrellas to the structure — a tactic inspired not by the French, but by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — to protect from the water cannon. 

The crowd of police just watched as I directed the resistance. They recorded everything, sussing me out. Then, they mobilized the arresting squad. The police surged forward, grabbing anyone they could — journalists, protesters, they didn’t care. I started to run, but my fashion-victim status let me down, badly. I was wearing my cute new purple Adidas Sambas. But those shoes have no grip, as anyone who owns a pair knows. I slipped on the wet ground. 

A bunch of masked police jumped on me and began beating me mercilessly. At one point I nearly scrambled away, but again my sartorial choices screwed me over. My blazer was tied around my waist and they grabbed it and pulled me back.

By law in Georgia, all police officers have to wear a visible badge number. But during the protests, police hide their badges and mask up with balaclavas, so it’s difficult to prosecute them for brutality down the line.  

They started hitting the back of my head hard, and all I could do was protect my eyes and curl into the fetal position. They dragged me behind the police line and continued laying into me. Then they surrounded me, taunting me, telling me to hit myself and say that I was a little bitch. My legs were like jelly and I could barely stand. I did whatever they ordered, desperate, until they threw me into a van. Already, there was a lump the size of a bar of soap on the back of my head, with deep blue panda rings forming around my eyes. 

They hauled me to prison, but it took them six hours to get me inside. There was already a queue of other protesters they’d caught. My captors waited in the van with me, watching Russian TikToks for hours on end. Honestly, that was almost worse than the beating.  

The atmosphere inside the cells was desperate. People were silently pacing up and down, their spirits hitting rock bottom. Police were bringing in more protesters all the time, their radios crackling. I was in a cell with three other guys. “They beat me like a dog,” one of them said, showing me a bootprint-shaped bruise on his back. I realized we had to get the morale up, fast — and show the guards they couldn’t break us. 

We sang all the songs we could think of — “Bella Ciao,” the European anthem, a bunch of Georgian songs. At one point I even sang the Marseillaise. The police told us to shut up. We kept singing, and cracked terrible jokes that this was a five-star digital detox. 

I got out of jail because a lawyer helped me, pro bono. She works for the Human Rights Center, a group of lawyers here in Georgia that under the new law would be at the top of the state’s list of “foreign agents.” That lawyer, she probably weighs 120 pounds, isn’t much more than 5 feet tall, and she’s formidable. When she goes into the police station, you see the fear in their eyes. She’s the best. If it wasn’t for her and her organization, I would still be in jail. This Russian law wants to take away our access to human rights lawyers like her. 

Two weeks on, and my concussion is getting better, day by day. The nausea has eased and the daily headaches are becoming less intense. 

I’m back on the streets. At these protests, the energy feels different. There’s a crazy electricity in the air. Everyone is singing, fighting, determined not to lose their country. A lot of the protesters are my age — Gen Z. We don’t remember the chaos and corruption of the 1990s. We’re not worn down, like older people, by decades of protesting. We’re also more savvy than our parents’ generation about fact-checking. We don’t just swallow the stream of propaganda that’s fed to us. We’re ready to fight. I spoke with my uncle on the phone about it yesterday morning, just before the law was passed — he told me “my hopes are in Gen Z and a miracle.” 

By Luka Gviniashvili as told to Isobel Cockerell

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the lawyer's association that advised Gviniashvili. It was the Human Rights Center, not the Young Lawyer's Association.

The post I’m protesting Georgia’s ‘Russian law.’ The police beat me up mercilessly appeared first on Coda Story.

With Navalny dead, the chilling title of Russia’s highest-profile political prisoner now belongs to Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza, a 42-year-old historian, journalist and opposition politician, is currently held in Siberia, in the same type of punitive solitary confinement cell that Navalny had occupied before he was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic, where he died on February 16. 

Kara-Murza, who comes from a long line of Russian dissidents, was arrested in April 2022 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for charges related to his criticism of President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. By then, he had already survived being poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. In February 2021, a Bellingcat investigation uncovered that Kara-Murza had been followed by the same unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service that allegedly poisoned Navalny with a nerve agent in 2020. Kara-Murza was also a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, another slain Russian opposition politician who was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. 

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the eventual murder of Navalny, and Russia’s descent into a Stalinesque dictatorship were still only hypothetical scenarios when Kara-Murza and I sat down for an interview in Tbilisi, Georgia, five years ago. He was there for a conference. We talked about disinformation, his hopes for Russia and what makes him angry. (Spoiler: It was the complacency of the so-called “golden billion,” the people who live in democratic countries and take their freedoms for granted, while so much of the world is not free. 

The interview was supposed to become part of a larger Coda project that never got off the ground, thanks to Covid. In the years that followed, I assumed the interview had been lost amid Coda’s pandemic-era transition to a fully remote team, but recently we found the footage. We are publishing it now; the transcript below has been edited for clarity.

What keeps you awake at night?

The thought that Russia, my country, one of the most cultured and one of the most beautiful nations in the world has for two decades now been ruled by a corrupt and authoritarian kleptocracy that is stealing from its own people and that is violating the most basic rights and freedoms of its own people. That’s not a normal situation.

What do you think has been your country’s biggest mistake?

I will separate my country from the government of my country and I think the biggest mistake of the government of my country was the failure in the early 1990s to fully reckon with our communist and our Soviet past and to fully reckon with the mistakes and the crimes of that Soviet and that communist past. The Russian people were ready for it in the 1990s but the Russian government at that time was not up to the task.

I’ll say a word and if you can finish the sentence. Disinformation is…

Lying.

Give me an example of a fake news story that fooled you.

I think almost two decades of Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things that we hear so I’m not even able to think of one immediately.

Give me an example of a fake news story that has had a huge impact on the world.

Well, there was a story in 2014 on Channel 1 on Russian state television about Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a Russian child in the town of Sloviansk and it caused as you can imagine for any normal human beings, it would cause, it caused them an outpouring of anger and grief and resentment and then of course it turned out to be completely and utterly fake, just completely made-up. This is just one small example in a vast sea of propaganda and lying and disinformation put forward by the Putin regime. 

How do we stop democracy turning into plutocracy?

Well, as Winston Churchill said, democracy is a very flawed system but it’s the best one of everything that’s been created, so I think if a democracy functions properly and the institutions function, that in itself is the best guarantee against turning into plutocracy. Because when you have a government that is transparent and accountable to its own citizens, the citizens will not allow it to become a plutocracy.

Is technology helping dictators or democrats?

You know, the sun shines on both good people and on criminals, so I think in the same way, technology can be used for good and for bad and dictators have certainly been savvy very often with using modern technology and so should we be, and I can tell you that, you know, today in my country, in Russia, the internet and the social media are a major instrument that supports the civil society and the democratic movement and the pro-democracy movement, and I’ll give you just one example: Last year, in 2017, there was an investigative video put forward by the Anti-Corruption Foundation led by Alexei Navalny about the corrupt dealings of current Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and of course, if you watched Russian state television, you wouldn’t hear a single word about it and yet tens of millions of people watched that investigative video on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, and tens of thousands went on the streets all over Russia to protest against it. And I think that gives a powerful example of how important and how influential independent information space in modern technology can be.

What’s the biggest benefit of the Trump presidency?

I think it’s a very… I think the Trump presidency in many ways is a very useful reminder to those people who may have harbored some illusions that our job will be done for us by somebody else, that somebody else will come in from the outside and solve all our problems, that it’s not going to happen and it shouldn’t happen because it’s only for us, it’s only for the citizens of Russia to effect change in our country, to change the political situation in our country, to return democracy to our country. It’s not going to be done by Trump or Obama or Bush or Merkel or Macron or anybody else. This is only for us to do, it’s for us to sort out the situation in our own country, and I think the attitude of the current U.S. administration is a very good reminder of that.  

What’s one thing you would tell President Trump?

I will tell him what I will tell any Western leader if I were to meet them, is that, you know, if your country and your government and your system claims to adhere to the values of democracy and human rights and rule of law, then act on it and please stop enabling the crooks and the kleptocrats and the Kremlin by giving them safe havens in your countries for their looted wealth, for their bank accounts, for their real estate, for their families, which is what the West has been doing for many, many years. And that is why it is so important for those countries that have passed the Magnitsky laws, which are the laws imposing personal targeted sanctions on crooks and human rights abusers, to implement those laws to the full extent, and that includes the United States. And that’s why it’s so important for the countries that have not yet passed the Magnitsky laws to pass them and to implement them.

What is one thing you would say to Vladimir Putin?

I have nothing to say to that man. He knows full well what he’s doing. He’s an intelligent person and everything he’s been doing to our country for the last two decades, he’s been doing on purpose and I have nothing to say to this man.

What is Putin’s biggest nightmare? 

The answer is very clear: It’s the people on the streets. We saw how scared and how frightened they were in December of 2011 when we had tens of thousands people on the streets of Moscow protesting against the Putin regime. So for a few days the regime was caught completely surprised. For the first time in their time in power, they had lost the initiative and they were on the defensive and you could see the terror in their eyes and frankly, you know, if you look even at the faces of the policemen who came to the Sakharov Avenue protests on December 24, 2011, when we had something like 120,000 people on the streets of central Moscow protesting against the Putin regime, you can read the fear in the eyes of those police officers and you can read that the biggest thing they were afraid of is that they would be given the order to shoot and they didn’t want to shoot because these people are their friends, their neighbors, their relatives, and that is the thing that is the biggest nightmare for the Putin regime. Just as it has been a nightmare for so many authoritarian regimes all over the world, including here in Georgia.

What should the Western liberal democracies fear more: the government of China or the government of Russia?

You know, I think human rights are universal and the rule of law is universal and the principles of democracy are universal, so I don't want to sound as if I think different standards should be applied to different countries. No, human rights are for everybody, the citizens of China and the citizens of Russia. But I do think that it is important to remember that Russia is a member of the Council of Europe, that Russia is a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and everything that Vladimir Putin has been doing both in his domestic and his foreign policy over the last two decades is breaking and violating the most fundamental rules of those organizations, and so I think for that reason Western countries should be much more indignated about what Vladimir Putin’s regime has been doing.

What makes you angry about the world?

About how few people care about the violations of the rights of people in other countries. It’s, you know, the so-called golden billion, the people who live in successful democracies. They very often forget that the vast majority of the population of our globe live in countries that are not free, live in conditions that are not free and they lack the basic rights and freedoms that so many people in the West take for granted. I think it’s very important for the people in the West not to lose sight of that.   

What makes you hopeful?

When I look at the tens of thousands of young people who have been and continue to come out to the streets of cities and towns all across Russia to voice their protest against the endemic corruption and the authoritarianism of the Putin regime despite the pressure and the dangers and the threats and the beatings and the arrests. That really makes me hopeful about the future of my country and about the future of the world as well. 

What’s one film everyone should see?

It’s going to be a tough competition, but given everything that we’ve just been talking about, I’d say watch the “Trial at Nuremberg” [“Judgment at Nuremberg”]. It’s a film that made one of the most profound impacts on me, I can tell you that, and that phrase there at the end of the film, when the young prosecutor is talking to this elderly American judge about the situation, I’m not going to give a spoiler, you’ll know what I mean when you see the film, but what that elderly judge answers is that “Yes, what you’re saying is correct, is factually correct, but there is nothing on this earth that makes it right.” I think that’s a very important message to remember in our time as well.

One book everyone should read?

My favorite is “Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, but I think I’m biased towards Russian literature.

When was the last time you felt really scared?

I suppose it was in the early hours of February 2 of 2017, the second time I was poisoned in Moscow, and I knew what it was because it had happened before so I knew the symptoms and I knew I only had a few hours left of being conscious before falling into a coma again and it was… The scariest thing was not being able to breathe. When you make this movement that every person makes every day, every minute, to take in the air and you feel as if the air is not coming in, you feel as if you’re suffocating, and that’s very painful but also a very frightening experience. 

What does the world look like in five years?

Hopefully with a Russia that has a government that respects the rights of its own people and that respects the rule of law and democracy at home and that behaves as a responsible citizen on the international stage.

This piece was originally published as the most recent edition of the weekly Disinfo Matters newsletter.

The post An unseen interview with Vladimir Kara-Murza: ‘Putin’s propaganda has taught us not to trust a lot of things’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Desta and his colleagues did their best to treat them, but by the time many arrived at the hospital, it was too late. “We tried to save so many lives,” he recalled, “but in most cases we were not able to.”

These were Desta’s early years as a physician, when one-third of all maternal deaths in Ethiopia could be linked to unsafe abortions. Thousands of women died each year. Under pressure to reduce the maternal mortality rate, the Ethiopian parliament passed a groundbreaking law loosening abortion restrictions for a variety of health conditions in 2005. The policy brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of deaths from unsafe abortions, and the bleak and overwhelmed hospital units that Desta remembers so vividly eventually shut down. The closure of the wards was “a success,” he explained. “I am a living witness that abortion care saves lives.”

But lately, Desta, who is now the Ethiopia program director for the global reproductive health nonprofit Ipas, worries that the dark days of those wards could become a part of Ethiopia’s reality again. That’s because the country’s abortion law is on shaky ground, thanks to the efforts of an emboldened anti-abortion movement buoyed by a court ruling halfway around the world: The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 2022 decision to limit abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The Dobbs ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion — marked an anomaly in the trajectory of global abortion policy making over the last 30 years, which has trended sharply toward liberalization. 

Since the ruling, there has been a wave of abortion-related policy shifts around the world. In France, lawmakers used Dobbs as the basis for a legislative proposal that would enshrine abortion rights in the French constitution. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion earlier this month, despite the country’s deep Catholic roots. There is mounting support for policies to protect legal access to the procedure in Argentina and Colombia.

Anti-abortion groups, meanwhile, see Dobbs as a signal that it may not be so difficult to roll back the gains made by abortion advocates. “The opposition has tasted blood in the water,” Lori Adelman, the acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, told me. In India, anti-abortion activists took to the streets of Delhi in the months after Dobbs, calling on the Indian government to repeal its 1971 law legalizing abortion. In Italy, pro-choice gynecologists are facing a fresh wave of harassment by an emboldened anti-abortion movement riding a post-Roe high. 

But nowhere has the anti-abortion movement been more energized by Roe’s overturning than on the African continent. While abortion is restricted across much of the region, those countries that have expanded access are now seeing a backlash.

In Kenya, opponents are already drawing on Roe’s reversal to challenge abortion policy. According to the international reproductive rights advocacy organization Fos Feminista, which recently published a report about Dobbs’ global impact, anti-abortion groups highlighted Dobbs as a reason to appeal a 2022 constitutional court decision in Kenya expanding abortion access. The ruling, which came out before Roe was overturned, affirmed abortion as a fundamental right in Kenya’s constitution, citing international jurisprudence on abortion, including Roe v. Wade. But opposition groups latched onto Dobbs as a reason to challenge the judgment, arguing that the judge who decided the case relied on “bad law” from the U.S. The decision is now stayed, pending appeal. “The fact that it was entertained is really worrisome to many that are working on the ground in Kenya,” said Kemi Akinfaderin, a global advocacy officer with Fos Feminista.

In Nigeria, the governor of the state of Lagos suspended policy guidelines about abortion care for life-threatening health conditions less than a month after Roe was overturned. Abortion opponents seized upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that the governor should follow the ruling’s lead and revoke the provisions. In July 2022, he did. “The Dobbs decision has trickled down to Nigeria, and it’s very disappointing,” said Ijeoma Egwuatu, the communications director for the Nigeria-based reproductive health nonprofit, Generation Initiative for Women and Youth Network. 

For abortion opponents, the U.S. trajectory provides a possible model for reversing abortion gains.

“They are saying, ‘Dobbs is the wind we need behind our sails,’” Akinfaderin told me. “‘If we can do this in the U.S., we can do this anywhere else.’” For abortion advocates, it’s a glaring warning. “For the longest time, Roe has been seen as a gold standard,” Akinfaderin continued. “And so the fact that this can happen in the U.S. is a very clear indication to some in the feminist movement in Africa that it can happen here as well. These gains can be lost over time.”

Akinfaderin, who is based in Togo, believes that abortion opponents have strategically chosen where to focus their attention on the African continent. “They’re not making mistakes,” she explained. “They are targeting big countries, countries with political influence and countries with very strong religious communities.”

Enter Ethiopia, the second-most populous country in Africa after Nigeria and the home to the headquarters of the African Union. The country has a distinctive history and cultural legacy. It is one of just two countries on the continent that successfully resisted colonization. (Liberia is the other.) Ethiopia is also home to a distinct Christian Orthodox tradition dating back to the 4th century. Orthodox Christians are the country’s largest and most influential religious group, making up more than 40% of the population. One-third of the population identifies as Muslim and nearly one-fifth as Protestant. Abortion remains controversial in the country — surveys show the majority of Ethiopians, including Orthodox Christians, oppose the procedure. 

The policy reforms in Ethiopia in 2005 legalized abortion in a variety of circumstances, including if a woman was a victim of rape or incest, if her life is in danger, if she has physical or mental disabilities or if she is a minor and is not ready to have a child. The changes had a dramatic impact. Today, deaths from unsafe abortions make up just 1% of maternal deaths in Ethiopia, compared to over 30% before the law went into effect. 

But Ethiopian reproductive health advocates worry that those advances are now in jeopardy. Over the last year, the country’s anti-abortion movement has coalesced around a concrete goal. “They are targeting the abortion law,” said Abebe Shibru, a longtime reproductive health advocate and the Ethiopia country director for the international health nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices. “Now, anti-abortion groups are intensifying their movement and they are targeting policymakers, health providers — anyone who might have a strong stake in sexual reproductive health services.” Because of this momentum, Shibru continued, “this existing abortion law is very vulnerable.”

Much of this organizing has taken place behind the scenes, according to Shibru, as leading anti-abortion figures attempt to influence lawmakers, government officials and the general population. But a few public demonstrations from anti-abortion groups in recent months offer a glimpse into the movement’s goals and direction.

In July, thousands of people took to the streets in the town of Hawassa, Ethiopia, to speak out against abortion and LGBTQ rights. Nearly two dozen churches in the city opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage organized the demonstration, according to local media. Participants carried signs and chanted slogans about fetal rights and explained that the protest was organized to “save the youth” from the “dangers” of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Weeks before the protest, healthcare workers began catching glimpses of vans parked near abortion clinics in Addis Ababa. The cars, emblazoned with the slogan “Praying to end abortion in Ethiopia,” written in Amharic, were spotted repeatedly throughout the city in June, according to Desta, from Ipas. “Whenever a provider sees this car parked next to the clinic, or a woman sees this information when trying to access services from these clinics, they're embarrassed, they are harassed,” he told me. It’s unclear who was behind this effort, but Desta believes it reflects a more confrontational strategy from the opposition post-Roe. 

“Before the decision, they were not boldly coming out in the media and talking about abortion. But now, they are in the media, on TV  and on social media,” Desta said. “They are very vocal, very organized, and boldly speaking out about abortion in Ethiopia.”

According to Desta and other observers, one group leading the charge to repeal Ethiopia’s abortion law is Family Watch International, a U.S.-based nonprofit that claims to be working to “protect and promote the family as the fundamental unit of society.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The organization’s leader has compared same-sex marriage to drug addiction and argued that the “homosexual agenda is a worldwide attempt to justify behavior that is inherently destructive to both society and to the individual.” 

While headquartered in Arizona, the organization has long worked in Africa and maintains an active presence in Ethiopia with an office in Addis Ababa, according to interviews with several reproductive rights advocates working there. After Roe was overturned, Family Watch wrote on its website that the decision was a “historic victory for life and family.” The organization’s Africa chapter, it added, is “working to stop abortion being pushed abroad.” The group’s Africa director is Seyoum Antonios, a prominent Ethiopian physician who recently railed against “the LGBTQ, abortion, and child sexualization and transgender agenda of the European Union” in an August speech to the African Bar Association. 

As of now, Ethiopia’s law is still standing. The forces jeopardizing its survival may not ultimately succeed in toppling the policy, and the transnational anti-abortion coalition — though energized — still faces an uphill battle if it wants to reverse global trends in abortion policymaking.

But even without a change in the law, the opposition’s efforts already appear to be having tangible impacts on the country’s abortion landscape. Over the last year, Shibru and his colleagues have noticed that some healthcare workers in public clinics have ceased providing abortion services — a likely result of the amplified pressure campaign against them. Shibru told me that providers are facing harassment from “their friends, their families, and their communities.” He added, “​When you go into public facilities, we heard that this facility used to provide safe abortion, but not now. Because we used to get good support, but now no one is encouraging us.” 

Additionally, Shibru said that he and other reproductive health workers have documented an increase in the number of women seeking medical treatment for abortion-related complications over the last year. Fewer clinics offering services could cause women to seek out unsafe alternatives, Shibru explained, and medical care for procedures gone wrong. These scenarios, coupled with the abortion law’s shaky standing, fill Shibru with dread. 

“​​What does it mean if the law is reversed?” he asked. “We are going back 20 years. That means more maternal mortality. Hospitals will be occupied with abortion-related problems.The women in Ethiopia in danger.” Such a scenario, he continued, “will be a big moral crisis.”

The post Roe’s repeal has energized Africa’s anti-abortion movement appeared first on Coda Story.

“Let’s all go out and round them up,” the man says in the video, urging Greeks to follow his lead and perform citizen’s arrests on migrants. “They will burn us.” 

The Greek police arrested the man who made the video, and he is currently awaiting trial. The police also arrested the migrants the man claimed he had caught attempting to start fires. They were later released without charges.

The video, and others like it, tapped into suspicions among residents of Evros that the wildfires were the fault of migrants, thousands of whom pass through the region’s thick forest every year en route to inland Europe. Simmering anger against migrants has bubbled to the surface in Greece, aided by social media, as locals seek to apportion blame for intense wildfires that have been torching their region since July.

More than 300 square miles of land along Greece’s border with Turkey have been devastated by the blaze, which is the worst wildfire ever recorded in Europe. Lightning strikes were suspected to be the cause, but the arrests of 160 people across Greece on charges of arson — 42 for deliberately starting fires and the rest for negligence leading to fires — have heightened local anger.

Speculation that foreigners ignited the fires was also linked to the charred remains of 18 suspected migrants, two of them children, found on August 22. The deceased, sheltering in the forest, appear to have been trapped as gale-force winds spread the blaze with devastating speed. One group was found huddled together, appearing to have clutched each other as the fire claimed their lives. Earlier this month, the Greek authorities said they had rescued a group of 25 migrants who were trapped in the Dadia Forest, where fires blazed for more than two weeks.

A few days after the video began circulating on social media, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stood in front of parliament to defend his government’s performance in the face of mounting cries of incompetence. 

“It is almost certain,” Mitsotakis claimed, “that the causes were man-made.” He added: “It is also almost certain that this fire was started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country.”

Mitsotakis didn’t present any evidence to back up his certainty. Indeed, the only thing he conceded he didn’t know was if the fires were caused by negligence or if they were “deliberate.”

Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.  

For decades, migrants have crossed through the forests and the cold, fast-moving Evros River to get from Turkey to Greece. Sometimes, they find themselves in no-man’s land, trapped on islets that appear to be controlled by neither Greece nor Turkey. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that migrants, if they make it over to the Greek riverbank, are sometimes turned over by the authorities to “men who appear to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin,” who are tasked with forcing the migrants onto rubber dinghies and leaving them in the middle of the Evros River. From there, the migrants either take shelter on an islet or wade back to the Turkish side where they are also not welcome.

Political scientist Pavlous Roufos, who has written extensively about Greek social movements and the 2010 economic crisis, told me, “There’s a kind of dehumanization of the migrant situation happening in Greece at the moment.” Now a professor at the University of Kassel, in central Germany, Rouflos monitors both the physical violence migrants face and the disinformation being spread online about their responsibility for the wildfires in Evros. 

“What we are seeing online,” Roufos told me, “is just a fraction of what’s happening in these communities. You can multiply those videos by 20 or 30 to get the real picture.”

Local antipathy towards migrants in Evros shows, Roufos suggests, how little has changed since February 2020, when Turkey announced that it would open its western borders for migrants and asylum seekers looking to go to Europe. In what became known as the “Evros Crisis,” Greece responded by shutting its borders, suspending asylum laws and violently arresting and pushing refugees back over the border toward Turkey. Armed citizen groups, similar to those who rounded up migrants in Evros last month, stood shoulder to shoulder with Greek border guards to repel asylum seekers trying to enter Greece.

In September 2020, when fires tore through the Moria camp, a squalid housing unit for 13,000 refugees in a village in the northeastern Greek island of Lesvos, anti-immigrant groups helped police block people from getting to safety in neighboring towns. Six Afghans were convicted on arson charges, though human rights lawyers familiar with the case have argued that the refugees were framed and that their jailing was a matter of political expediency rather than justice.

During both events, there were huge surges of activity in online groups promoting extremist and anti-migrant narratives, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The researchers tracked nearly 2,000 Facebook and Twitter accounts that promoted harmful rhetoric around the incident: They pushed the narrative that refugees deliberately started the Moria fires and were, in some cases, burning their children to elicit sympathy. The accounts also pushed white supremacist campaigns like #TheGreatReplacement, which refers to a conspiracy theory that foreigners are seeking to culturally and demographically replace the white race. 

The researchers wrote that their work “makes clear that the refugee crisis has acted as a catalyst for mobilizing a transnational network of actors, including far-right extremists and elements of the political right, who often share common audiences and use similar tactics.”

After the German government promised to accommodate 1,500 asylum seekers from Moria, German far right groups were also set off, with accounts linked to far right political parties, like the Alternative for Germany, spreading new rounds of hate and disinformation targeting migrants. 

The spread of these narratives has coincided with the rise of the far right in Europe, where populist movements are uniting across borders and merging with previous center-right factions over issues like migration, identity and Islamophobia. Similar to Austria and Italy, Greece is seeing a shift to the right. Three ultranational parties won 12% of the seats in parliament in recent elections, and the ruling conservative New Democracy party has been accused of pandering to extremist agendas to keep poll numbers up.

“The toxic narrative against migrants has been going on for a long time,” Lefteris Papagiannakis, the head of the Greek Refugee Council, told me. “The violence was to be expected as we have already seen it in Lesvos in 2019,” he added, referring to racist attacks against migrants housed on the Greek island. Attacks in the past have targeted not just migrants but also rights activists and NGOs assisting refugees. Lefteris says he and his colleagues are “worried, of course.”

But the wildfires and the damage they have caused have catalyzed a fresh wave of anti-migrant anger. By implying that migrants might be arsonists, Greek politicians, including the prime minister, appear to have the backs of the vigilantes.

The post While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants appeared first on Coda Story.

On August 21, officers from India’s Intelligence Bureau visited the campus as part of what was meant to be a routine procedure to renew Ashoka’s license to receive foreign funds. But the questions that the officers asked instead concerned an academic paper that had cast the country’s ruling party in a negative light. They also questioned the “intent” of the professor who had written the paper.

Even before the visit by officials, the professor had resigned from Ashoka. It is just the latest example of India’s shrinking space for research and criticism. 

Nandini Sundar, a writer and professor of sociology at the University of Delhi, told me that the Modi administration has censured and put pressure on academics it believes threaten its Hindu nationalist agenda. “Academic freedom in India is under attack,” she said, “and has been ever since 2014,” when Modi became prime minister. The Academic Freedom Index 2023, which assessed academic freedom in 179 countries, placed India in the bottom 30%. The report included India among 22 countries in which standards of academic freedom had fallen. 

The Index also traced the beginning of the decline in India’s academic freedom to 2009, when the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were not in power. But the report noted that “around 2013, all aspects of academic freedom began to decline strongly, reinforced with Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014.” It concluded that “India demonstrates the pernicious relationship between populist governments, autocratization, and constraints on academic freedom.”

Bolstered by India’s recent feats in space research – becoming on August 23 the first country to successfully land a craft in the southern polar region of the moon – Modi likes to describe his government as being devoted to science and innovation. But it has little time for the humanities, or the social sciences, or any research that does not fit its definition of “progress.” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi and prolific commentator on political and cultural affairs, told me that the “real challenge is self-censorship by academics due to legitimate fears of reprisal by university administrations and physical violence by right-wing groups.” 

He said academics rarely have the freedom to design their own curriculum, and research scholars are told to avoid certain subjects. “There has been an unprecedented ideological bias in new hirings,” he told me, meaning that the BJP has been eager to place friendly academics on faculties and in positions of power in universities across the country. Students at Indian universities have been some of the Modi administration’s most dogged and committed opponents, with even the United Nations noting the Indian government’s propensity for using violence and detention to intimidate student protestors.

On July 25, the paper in question, written by Sabyasachi Das, then an economics professor at Ashoka, was posted on the Social Science Research Network website which publishes “preprints,” that is, papers which await peer review and journal publication. Das had reportedly presented his findings at a talk in the United States. Titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy,” the paper claimed to document “irregular patterns in 2019 general election in India,” comprehensively won by the Modi-led BJP, and to “present evidence that is consistent with electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies.”

According to Das, the “manipulation appears to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against India’s largest minority group – Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers.”

Once news of the still unpublished, yet-to-be reviewed paper emerged on social media, it caused a political furor. M.R Sharan, an Indian economics professor at the University of Maryland, explained on X (formerly known as Twitter) that although Das’ “astonishing” new paper showed that the BJP had perhaps gained a dozen seats through electoral manipulation, this was a negligible number in an election in which the BJP won 303 seats, 31 seats more than the number required to win an outright majority in parliament.

But the impact on the results of the election or lack thereof was beyond the point, argued prominent opposition figures such as Shashi Tharoor, once a candidate for the post of secretary- general at the U.N. Das’ conclusion, Tharoor said, “offers a hugely troubling analysis for all lovers of Indian democracy.” The “discrepancy in vote tallies,” he wrote on X, needed to be accounted for by the government or India’s Election Commission “since it can’t be wished away.”

The BJP responded to Das’ paper with fury. On X, Nishikant Dubey, a BJP member of parliament, demanded to know how Ashoka University could permit a professor, “in the name of half-baked research,” to “discredit India’s vibrant poll process?” 

Das also became a target of online trolling by Hindu nationalists and BJP supporters. Ashoka tried to distance itself from Das, claiming it had no responsibility for “social media activity or public activism by Ashoka faculty, students or staff in their individual capacity.” By the middle of August, Das had handed in his resignation. It was quickly accepted by the university administration.

On August 16, student journalists at the university’s newspaper reported that a public meeting was held in which “students, alumni and faculty expressed their escalating dismay regarding academic freedom at Ashoka.” 

In an open letter to administrators posted on X, the economics department wrote that the governing body’s interference was “likely to precipitate an exodus of faculty.” The letter also warned that if Das wasn’t given his job back and the administration continued to interfere with research, the faculty “will find themselves unable to carry forward their teaching obligations in the spirit of critical inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth that characterize our classrooms.”

But only a couple of days later, the fledgling protest fizzled out. The promised exodus or strike never happened. Only one professor resigned. Instead, the administration told students that the economics department had “reaffirmed its commitment to holding classes, a sentiment echoed by almost all other departments.”

The episode with Das isn’t the first time that the university has been embroiled in matters of academic freedom. The tacit acceptance of Das’ departure suggests that Ashoka, set up as a U.S.-style liberal university with private donors, continues to have  little stomach for confrontation with the government. 

In 2021, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a professor and former Ashoka vice chancellor, resigned from the university. Mehta, a public intellectual steadfast in his opposition to Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, was told that his presence at Ashoka was turning into a “political liability.”  His “public writing in support of a politics that tries to honor constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, [was] perceived to carry risks for the university,” he said. 

As far back as 2016, just two years after Ashoka University was founded, the Indian magazine Caravan revealed that the administration might have forced the resignation of staff members who had signed a petition protesting state violence in the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. 

Few academics at Ashoka are now willing to speak to journalists about Das or the issues of academic freedom that have surfaced since  the BJP’s angry response to his paper. Economist Jayati Ghosh, another prominent critic of the Modi government, wrote on X that she was “truly shocked at the lack of solidarity displayed by senior faculty” at Ashoka. “They have so little to lose from defending basic academic freedom,” she added. “Silence enables injustice, and it spreads.”

A professor at Ashoka who asked to remain anonymous told me that there were “plenty of caveats in Das’ paper and it had yet to go through rigorous peer review but the outsized reaction shows that the paper hit home.” Another liberal intellectual, who also asked to speak anonymously, told me that the paper questions the “most fundamental aspect of India’s claim to being a democracy – free and fair elections.” By continuing to send a message that academic insubordination will not be tolerated, they added, “the BJP is warning universities to control areas of research.” 

Mehta, who resigned from Ashoka in 2021, was also a former president of the Center for Policy Research, a well-respected Delhi think tank. In July, The Hindu reported that the center’s tax-exempt status and license to raise foreign funds had been revoked. Nearly 75% of its funds were raised abroad. In the absence of an official reason for the decision, the media has speculated that what might have led to the crackdown were the frequently combative articles that CPR staffers publish about Modi administration policies and the independent research that the center undertakes, which  has often contradicted the official government line. 

The BJP appears determined to stamp out criticism of Modi. In January, when the BBC broadcast a documentary in the U.K. examining Modi’s actions as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots in the state, the Indian government banned it from being screened in India. When students tried to organize public screenings in defiance of the ban, they were allegedly detained by the police and suspended by their universities. 

Academic freedom and the need to ask questions, it appears, is less important to Indian universities than appeasing the government of the day.

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Across the water, shimmering in the heat, stand imposing steel and concrete structures — the brand new plants built by Sinomine, one of the several Chinese companies that have invested in Zimbabwe’s nascent lithium mining industry. Soon, Sinomine will be exporting the lithium from its Bikita mines to massive battery manufacturing factories in China. This neglected rural district is now one more pawn in China’s gambit to control the world’s supplies of rare earth elements and minerals.

The Mungezi River forms the border between Bikita and the equally poor neighboring district of Gutu. On a Friday afternoon in July, Nelson Chamisa, the young, charismatic leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition, is on the campaign trail.

“Our minerals are being exploited,” Chamisa says to the crowd at a rally. “You are getting nothing. The only thing you are getting are cracks in your houses from the dynamite blasts. Our people are still jobless, they still remain poor.” 

On August 23, 2023, Zimbabweans are scheduled to vote in a general election. Chamisa and the incumbent president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are — as they were in 2018 — in a standoff, with none of the other candidates expected to be in the running. Mnangagwa took over the presidency in Zimbabwe in 2017, when long-time president and strongman Robert Mugabe was deposed in a coup. A year later, Mnangagwa won a disputed election. During his time in office, Zimbabwe has lurched from one economic crisis to another.

But now Zimbabwe has been marked as a potential lithium hub. “Lithium batteries,” Elon Musk tweeted last year, “are the new oil.” China is, by a significant margin, the world’s largest manufacturer of these batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, laptops and mobile phones among other things. And as the pressure to transition away from fossil fuels grows, the demand for lithium has been outstripping supply, raising prices and setting off a scramble to discover alternative sources.

Chinese and Western companies have their eyes on mining minerals across Africa, including, for example, Morocco and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cobalt reserves in the DRC are critical to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, leading to a rush to mine the metals often under inhuman conditions. When Pope Francis visited Kinshasa, the DRC’s capital, he said that the “poison of greed” was “choking Africa” and that the continent was “not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered.” 

But with the value of the EV battery market projected to increase from about $56 billion in 2022 to an estimated $135 billion in 2027, Zimbabwe’s lithium deposits represent an enormous economic opportunity for a debt-ridden country that has been suffering from international economic isolation and U.S. sanctions for 20 years. 

Sanctioned by the United States, Mnangagwa has turned to China, Russia and Iran for support. In July 2023, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stopped in the Zimbabwean capital Harare as part of his three-country African tour. The crowd waved Zimbabwean and Iranian flags. Mnangagwa described Raisi as his brother. “When you see him, you see me,” said Mnangagwa. “When you see me, you see him.” 

And at the 2023 Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin reportedly gave Mnangagwa a helicopter. Putin also included Zimbabwe among a half dozen nations that Russia promised to supply with grain for free after refusing to extend the Black Sea grain deal that enabled exports of Ukrainian grain to Africa. Victims of American sanctions must cooperate, Mnangagwa said, “and this is the cooperation we are seeing.”

In Mnangagwa’s view, the West has had decades to mine and invest in Zimbabwean minerals and has done little. Sinomine and other Chinese companies, on the other hand, have moved quickly. The fruits of Chinese investment are evident across Zimbabwe. Last year, Mnangagwa delivered a State of the Nation address from a new $200 million parliamentary building entirely funded and constructed by China. Opponents of Chinese investment, Mnangagwa says, just want to hand Zimbabwe to the West. “They want our lithium,” Mnangagwa says of Western companies, “they want our minerals.”

Instead, it is Chinese companies, the Zimbabwean government argues, that offer Zimbabwe the best deal. For instance, Sinomine expects to create 1,000 jobs at its two Bikita plants and export up to $500 million of lithium concentrate every year. By comparison, the plants’ previous European owners did nothing for 50 years.  

Standing on the back of a pickup truck, Nelson Chamisa tells cheering supporters that these projections of Chinese success mean little unless locals benefit from the jobs and the profits. “Do you see any development from the lithium here?” Chamisa asked his supporters in Gutu. “Kana,” they roared back. Nothing.

According to the Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency, international investors are flocking to the country for lithium. Of the 116 investment licenses issued to foreign investors in the first three months of 2023, 42 were given to companies seeking to buy into the lithium industry. “Without doubt, mining outstrips every other area,” Tafadzwa Chinhamo, the head of ZIDA told me. “Most of our licenses right now are for lithium mining, prospecting and processing.”

His list of applications for licenses tells the story of the race to mine Zimbabwean lithium. In the first half of 2023, he told me, ZIDA received 160 investor applications from China, up from 53 over the same period in 2022. By contrast, there were only five U.S. applications and 10 U.K. applications. The Chinese applications for the first quarter of 2023 pledged investments of $944 million, compared to $166 million proposed by U.S. investors.

Zimbabwe’s opposition claims that Chinese companies are being given free rein over the nation’s mineral resources and allowed to cut regulatory corners and scar the environment. The ruling party says the opposition are megaphones for the West.

This has not gone unnoticed in Washington, D.C.

At a March confirmation hearing for Pamela Tremont, the U.S. ambassador-designate to Zimbabwe, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was clear on what they expected her to do — go to Zimbabwe and counter China’s influence. Chinese and Russian interests, Tremont told the committee, “comprise about 90% of the foreign direct investment in Zimbabwe’s mineral sector.” Expressing doubt about the terms of the contracts, Tremont added that she “would certainly hope the Zimbabwean government is ensuring that the Zimbabwean people are getting fair compensation for the minerals taken from their country.”

Her comments riled the Chinese embassy in Harare. A spokesperson told The Herald, Zimbabwe’s state-owned daily newspaper, that “Zimbabwe should not be used as a wrestling ground for major-country rivalry.” China, the spokesperson said, was focused on bringing more development to Zimbabwe, while the U.S. was slapping “illegal” sanctions on Zimbabwe and meddling in its internal affairs.

But Chinese investment in Zimbabwe is not without controversy.

Goromonzi is a farming area just east of Harare, the capital. Standing on a red-soiled ridge, I saw maize fields stretching to the horizon on one side of the Nyaguwe River. On the other side, Shengxiang, a small Chinese company, has started mining for lithium. According to the local office of the Environmental Management Agency, the company is operating in the area illegally.

“We inspected the mine, found them in breach of regulations, fined them and ordered them to stop operations until they got an EIA [environmental impact assessment authorisation],” said Astas Mabwe, the officer in charge of the area. Still, Mabwe told me, the company kept mining.

A member of the ruling party told me anonymously: “Who is going to go out and fight an investor when the president is calling for more investment?”

The Chinese Chamber of Enterprises in Zimbabwe, which represents over 80 companies in the country, insists that companies like Shengxiang are in the minority. Allegations of illegal operations, Chinese authorities say, are part of a campaign of deliberate misinformation.

Last year, local newspapers published a series of articles that argued that Chinese companies in Zimbabwe had flouted a number of laws safeguarding the environment and labor rights. The reporting was attributed to the Information for Development Trust, a journalism program funded by the U.S. embassy in Harare.

Aja Stefanon, from the U.S. embassy’s economic affairs department, said last year that the program’s “work has ensured that the media plays its watchdog role in safeguarding shared goals in labor, human rights, and natural resources governance.”

Predictably, the Chinese embassy saw it differently. It told The Herald that the Information for Development Trust was “a puppet sponsored and manipulated by the U.S. Embassy to attack Chinese investment in Zimbabwe.” It “had long fabricated false information and published anti-China news,” the Chinese embassy said.  

Back in Bikita, Sinomine, under the conditions of its mining license, will spend an extra $2 million to supply uninterrupted power to local villages. This June, Sinomine started to drill 35 boreholes to provide water to these villages.
Until then, Molly Mandityira, a local village head said, eight villages shared a single borehole. “This,” she told me, “changes everything.” With people in rural areas generally voting in far greater numbers than people in urban areas, Mnangagwa might be counting on Chinese investment to win him the election

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This is what the Kremlin wants Russians to think happened when the battle-hardened mercenaries of the Wagner Group swept through Russia, unopposed, for over 600 miles before its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin called off the march to Moscow. 

As Wagner’s supposed coup attempt unfolded, Prigozhin became the undisputed star of the global news cycle. A former Kremlin caterer, Prigozhin, once an elusive figure, gained world renown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Wagner soldiers took on an increasingly prominent role on the frontlines, Prigozhin’s acerbic, angry rants about the incompetence of generals and legislators arguably represented the only sustained evidence that Russians were unhappy with how the war was going.  Given Prigozhin’s adept use of Telegram, it made sense that he would seize the initiative through his now infamous Telegram voice notes, effectively offering listeners a blow-by-blow account of his troops’ journey to Moscow.

But now that the uprising has seemingly fizzled out — with Prigozhin apparently having negotiated safe passage to Belarus — the Kremlin is scrambling to gain control of the narrative. According to Maria Borzunova, an independent Russian journalist who hosts a show debunking Russian state propaganda, Kremlin pundits on state TV have, so far, parroted four key narratives to explain the coup. 

First, the propagandists argued that the Russian military strike on the Wagner camp — which Prigozhin says precipitated his ill-fated march on Moscow — was staged. They also suggested that no one in Rostov-on-Don, the city Wagner briefly occupied, supported the mercenaries. This claim relies on a few shaky videos of Rostov residents confronting Wagner fighters. It also completely ignores widely circulated evidence of crowds in Rostov cheering Prigozhin’s private army. 

During the rebellion, and in the days since, state propaganda channels have also continued to remind viewers that Prigozhin’s actions played into the hands of Russia’s enemies, in particular Ukraine. But it is in the way pro-government talking heads describe the bewildering resolution to the standoff that is most instructive. 

According to the Kremlin’s version of events, the Russian people rallied behind Putin, displaying unity and resolve and undermining the enemy’s — likely foreign-funded — plot to bring Russia to her knees. “Their argument is that the civil war did not succeed because everyone rallied around the president,” said Borzunova. “However, this is not entirely true.” In fact, during the Wagner advance, a number of government officials recorded identical videos with the same text: “We support the president in this difficult situation.” Instructions for what they should write on social media were circulated to officials, Borzunova explained, and even then, some failed to publish the template text. 

On June 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an unannounced speech, his third in four days. Having already addressed the nation, he separately addressed the soldiers, who, he said, “have protected the constitutional order, the lives, security and freedom of our citizens, kept our homeland from descending into turmoil and stopped a civil war.” He handed out some medals and held a moment of silence for the pilots who were killed by Wagner mercenaries. 

No state channels carried this particular speech live, but Russian state media received a written set of guidelines for reporting on it. Independent media outlet Meduza managed to obtain these instructions. 

The document prompts reporters to refer to Wagner mercenaries as “rebels,” “traitors” and “false patriots,” whose actions could have plunged the country into chaos. It dubs the security forces “the real defenders of Russia” who worked to bring about a peaceful resolution. Putin, the guidelines remind journalists, is considered to be a “real leader” who prevented a “negative scenario of turmoil.” The explanation for Wagner’s sudden retreat is simple: The traitors realized that the Russian army “was not with them” and agreed to solve the conflict “without shedding blood.” 

The word “Prigozhin” is notably absent from the guidelines. Putin, too, has meticulously avoided mentioning Prigozhin in all his recent speeches — a tactic reminiscent of his well-documented refusal to utter the name of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Russian state propagandists have largely mimicked this rhetoric. “When virtually no one in society and in the government supported the rebellion, it became clear that the march on Moscow was meaningless,” said state TV presenter Dmitriy Kiselyov two days after the uprising. “Russia has once again passed the test of maturity, and the stronghold of unity has remained unshaken.” Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, dubbed the uprising a lesson that “has once again demonstrated that Russia is undefeatable when it is united.” 

As for Prigozhin, he has been branded a traitor, a label he is unlikely to ever shake. This was a complicated narrative shift for many Kremlin pundits to execute, Borzunova told me. Prigozhin had been loyal to Putin, and many in the government and state media shared the grievances he levied at the defense ministry before the uprising. 

Still, the propagandists, though shaken, have quickly fallen in line. The rebellion has been quashed, the brave Russian soldiers commended and the coup leader mercifully exiled. Of course, the picture of unity that the Kremlin propaganda is working hard to paint is a fantasy. “The fabric of the state is disintegrating,” wrote Andrei Koleniskov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Prigozhin’s actions were “an antecedent of civil unrest unfolding in real time.” 

And while speculation about the longevity of Putin’s regime continues around the world, the Kremlin propaganda machine keeps spinning its wheels, trying to narrate its way out of a crisis. The media guidelines that accompanied Putin’s recent speech emphasized the narrative that “the huge media machine of the rebels” attempted to destabilize the situation in the country. Evidently, it will take an equally powerful blitz of state propaganda to put Russia back on track. 

“Propaganda is doing everything to say that Wagner fighters are patriots, they were used,” said Borzunova. “Prigozhin is the main villain. Whether this works or not, we’ll see.”

The campaign to villainize Prigozhin is far from over. On June 28, Putin acknowledged, for the first time ever, that the Wagner Group had been financed out of Russia’s state budget for the past year, to the tune of $2 billion. “I do hope that, as part of this work, no one stole anything,” Putin said, in a clear signal that Prigozhin — still reeling from last week’s “armed mutiny” criminal charges, which were dropped — might be charged with financial crimes next. In fact, independent Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev reported on June 29 that the Kremlin has now decided to focus its information campaign on the “commercial” character of Prigozhin’s rebellion. “Allegedly, there was no political dimension to the rebellion at all,” Kolezev wrote. “It was all for money.”

If the Kremlin succeeds at convincing Russians that Prigozhin’s actions were a money-grabbing ploy, then the rebellion that, only days ago, seemed existential for the regime might actually strengthen Putin’s hand. 

When every viable alternative to Putin — from the pro-Western, liberally-minded Navalny, formally jailed for fraud, to the Kremlin loyalist who took Bakhmut — is only after the nation’s coffers, there really is no alternative. Or so the Kremlin would have Russians believe. 

CORRECTION [06/30/2023 11:19 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that Maria Borzunova hosts "Fake News." Borzunova is the former host of "Fake News" and currently hosts her own show debunking Russian propaganda.

The post How the Kremlin plans to prop up Putin appeared first on Coda Story.

Yazidis gathered to demonstrate against the return of the refugees. Videos quickly circulated online claiming to show Yazidis throwing stones at a mosque, and the rumors soon turned into explosive accusations that Yazidis were burning the mosque.

The Sunni Endowment Office, the body that administers Sunni mosques in Iraq, confirmed that the reports were false and that no damage was inflicted on the mosque. It was too late. Muslim religious leaders in Iraq released dozens of videos referring to Yazidis as devil worshippers — a historical trope frequently leveled against Yazidis — and called for them to be murdered. Fear spread among the thousands of Yazidis still residing in refugee camps in Iraq that another wave of violence is on the horizon.

Much of the fomenting of violence against Yazidis occurred on Facebook, but hate speech also spread in WhatsApp groups. A member of one WhatsApp group, for example, said they would bring a machine gun to a refugee camp in Kurdistan and kill as many Yazidis as they could. The French Embassy in Iraq released a statement condemning the proliferation of hate speech.

In August 2014, the Islamic State attacked Sinjar, killing over a thousand Yazidis during the first day alone and enslaving thousands of Yazidi women. A coalition of state and non-state actors supported by the United States pushed the Islamic State out of the region, but some 3,000 Yazidi women and children are still missing.

Sinjar is officially under the control of the Iraqi government, but it is a disputed territory claimed by the authority in charge of the autonomous Kurdistan region. In 2020, the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi government signed an agreement to jointly manage Sinjar, but the area is effectively under the control of different militia groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (better known as the PKK), a Kurdish militant group, and an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, which has dozens of mainly Shia Muslim armed factions connected to both the Iraqi and the Iranian states.

Between June and December 2020, it was reported that 38,000 Yazidis returned to Sinjar. Around 200,000 Yazidis still reside in refugee camps in the Kurdistan region, unable to return to Sinjar because of a lack of security and financial resources. Human Rights Watch has documented how the Iraqi government failed to provide thousands of Yazidis from Sinjar compensation for the destruction to property caused by the Islamic State, which they are entitled to under Iraqi law.

Sinjar — which is about the size of Rhode Island in the U.S. — is rife with competing interests, said Bayar Mustafa, the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kurdistan Hewler in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, putting Yazidis and other minority groups in Sinjar at heightened risk. The Iraqi government and its army are unable to guarantee security in Sinjar, and there is potential for a re-emergence of a movement similar to the Islamic State.

Islamic State was not just a military organization, but a social, religious and ideological movement, and there has been little effort to defeat the lingering influence of the terrorist organization, according to Mustafa.

Within the Kurdistan Region, Yazidis are under the protection of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has largely welcomed Yazidis and shielded them from mass killings. But the government has not done enough to tackle hate speech, said Hadi Pir, the co-founder of Yazda, an organization that advocates for Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria.

The fear that Yazidis may once again become the target of mass killings is compounded by the specter of chaos. “If a big political issue happens, for example the Iraqi government failed, or the Kurdistan Regional Government had some problems between the different groups in power, then again, there is a possibility Yazidis will be the target,” said Pir.

Yazidi activists say that efforts to educate the Iraqi public about Yazidis and past mass killings committed against them have largely failed. Meanwhile, international efforts to hold the perpetrators of the crimes accountable have been slow. Islamic State members have been prosecuted for terrorism, but the Iraqi justice system and international courts have been unwilling or unable to prosecute them for the crimes they committed against Yazidis. German courts have taken matters into their own hands, prosecuting one Islamic State member for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He killed  a five-year-old Yazidi girl, Reda, by tying her up in the sun as punishment for wetting her bed.

Attempts at transitional justice, the process whereby a society tries to come to terms with past acts of repression, are largely nonexistent in Iraq, and the current political system is failing to address these issues, said Zeynep Kaya, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sheffield. “I think people really underestimate the long-term consequences of sexual violence, of conflict, of displacement. These things continue to simmer in societies, and then they just don't disappear easily,” said Kaya.

Many Yazidis face a choice of staying in camps in the Kurdistan region, where the Iraqi government has reportedly stopped providing aid, or returning to Sinjar where they face an insecure environment. Many now are considering leaving Iraq altogether.

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Khan, who became prime minister in 2018, was a former superstar cricketer known for his dashing good looks and his complicated love life. He ran for office, though, as a religious conservative, eager to clean up corruption in Pakistan. He now faces corruption charges himself and was arrested for allegedly receiving free land as a bribe from a Pakistani real estate tycoon. 

Ousted from office in April 2022, Khan remained a powerful opposition figure with a large and fervent support base. In November, just months after he had lost a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, Khan was shot while leading a protest rally to the Pakistani capital Islamabad. 

He was in a wheelchair when he was arrested on May 9, 2023 by a paramilitary force on the steps of the Islamabad High Court, where he was appearing on a separate matter. After Khan’s release on bail, he blamed the Pakistani army chief for his arrest, claiming he had a personal vendetta against him. Khan’s supporters turned much of their fury, after his arrest, on the army. In Pakistan’s 75-year history as an independent nation, it is unlikely that the army, a venerated and feared institution, has ever been confronted with such a show of public disgust. One protester was interviewed holding peacocks he had taken from the lavish house of an army officer in the northeastern city of Lahore. Army officers, the protestor said, were living in grand style on the “people’s money.”

As videos of Khan’s arrest went viral, and in the face of growing violence nationwide, the Pakistani government chose to suspend mobile internet across the country for an “indefinite period” and ban access to sites such as Twitter, YouTube and much-used messaging services such as WhatsApp. At the time of writing, while the internet was largely restored, social media services were still being disrupted.

The economic impact of the internet shutdown on an already crumbling economy has been significant. P@sha, a trade association for Pakistan’s information technology industry, said the industry is losing $3 to 4 million every day that the internet is blocked. Pakistan’s central bank reserves currently cover barely a month’s worth of imports, and the crisis is so severe that the ratings agency Moody’s believes Pakistan could default on its debts without a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

I spoke to Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate from Pakistan who has been working to defend the rights of Pakistani citizens to access information online for almost 10 years. Hija strongly condemns the current internet shutdown and is concerned about the long-term damage it will inflict on the international investment climate in Pakistan and on the country’s once-exciting tech startups industry.

What has been the impact of the internet shutdown since May 9, when Imran Khan was arrested?

The shutdown has drastically impacted the ability of people to work, to earn money, and in this economy that is very concerning. Fiverr, a global hub for freelancers, has literally just barred Pakistanis from getting any jobs on the website due to the internet shutdown.

The banning of entire websites such as Twitter and YouTube is effectively censorship. We know from past experience that when YouTube is banned in Pakistan, industry is left behind, and it can take years to recover. Countries around us that were starting at the same point have now raced ahead of us. And we are never going to be able to compete because censorship and control over people’s access to the internet hinders tech companies and puts investors around the world off investing in Pakistan’s economy.

But is the internet shutdown necessary right now because of the internet’s potential use to incite violent protests? 

Internet shutdowns, either complete shutdowns or partial shutdowns, do not help Pakistan in any way whatsoever. Right now, the justification for the shutdown is national security, but there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security. In Pakistan, once the authorities shut down mobile internet services, did the protests stop? People were still killed, and public property was still destroyed. 

Are the authorities afraid of disinformation being spread if they do not shut down the internet?

Disinformation cannot be stopped through internet shutdowns. There have been multiple instances when there has been political unrest and the government resorted to internet shutdowns. What that has done is to promote even more disinformation. The internet is a way for people to access critical information, to fact-check information and to connect with each other. People still talk, still find ways to send WhatsApp messages, but now there is no way to provide credible information to large numbers of people. So shutdowns only promote disinformation and misinformation and, as a result, promote chaos.

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

We can agree that there is a lot of money in the technology sector globally. Just across the border in India, Google has been making a lot of investments, and Apple has opened its first store. These are the kind of investments that Pakistan, too, could see in the future, but the atmosphere is too uncertain, too volatile.

Our technology startups have been doing very well over the past few years, but continual crackdowns on internet access and internet shutdowns are a major hurdle that prevent startups from raising any funding.

What is the way forward?

Immediately unban all platforms that have been banned and open up access to the internet. And that must be the only way forward. After Imran Khan’s release, you would expect that now the internet would be restored. But again, the internet shutdown was not about his arrest, it was about the protests. The shutdown ends up hurting ordinary people and the economy. Students use mobile data and wireless devices. So when you suspend the internet, you are also depriving children from attending class or accessing educational material. You also deprive people of their livelihoods. These are the hidden costs of internet shutdowns.

The post Amid chaos, Pakistan shut down the internet to little effect appeared first on Coda Story.

After the February earthquakes that destroyed so much of the region, Syrian refugees became the targets of resentment, hate speech and violence. Politicians were quick to seize upon the public mood. Exploiting the anger directed at refugees became a key tactic for candidates in tense, often ugly campaigns. Turkey will vote in the first round of the presidential election on May 14, and, for the first time in two decades, it appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could lose his hold on power. 

In Antakya, three months after the earthquakes, hollowed-out homes with cracked walls hang precariously over a sea of rubble, trinkets and clothing. In Hatay province alone, over 23,000 people died in the earthquakes. Many in the area still live in camps. The luckier ones live in homes made out of shipping containers provided by the state. As Turkey faces repair bills totaling tens of billions of dollars, container homes — indeed, whole container cities — will be required as construction gets underway.  

Across the region most affected by the earthquakes, Syrian refugees are still living in makeshift tent colonies. NGO workers and Syrians I spoke to said they had been pushed out of official, state-run campsites by Turkish citizens and even the local authorities.

In April, Amnesty International accused the Turkish police of beating and torturing alleged looters in Antakya and reported that Syrians were targets of xenophobic abuse by Turkish officials.

Mouna, a Syrian refugee in Antakya whose home was destroyed in the earthquakes, told me she’d been forced to leave a state-run camp by the Turkish residents. She now lives in a tent she has set up beside the ruins of her former home. Resourcefully, Mouna has built an extension to her tent that contains a kitchen and a toilet. A washing machine and a fridge are powered by electricity rerouted from a nearby power supply. Her neighbors are all Syrian refugees who go in and out of the crumbling buildings around them to retrieve possessions to put in their tents. 

A 46-year-old single mother of two sons, Mouna left Syria in 2012, during the early phase of the Syrian civil war. She has been slowly building a life in Turkey. Her job in a dessert factory paid enough for her to afford rent and keep her family safe. 

After the earthquakes struck in February 2023, Mouna and her sons were housed in an official camp but were soon driven out by Turkish people who resented having to share scarce facilities with refugees. She says Syrians were bullied and told that they could not use the toilets. A little girl, Mouna says, hit her and told her that “Syrians should go home.” The authorities did little to help. Mouna and her neighbors rely on a Syrian NGO for water and food.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are “caught between two earthquakes,” says Murat Erdogan, a professor at Ankara University. “One is the physical earthquake,” Erdogan (no relation to the Turkish president) told me, “and the other is a political earthquake.” Even before the disaster, he adds, “social cohesion was not easy because of the number of the refugees.” There are over 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for nearly a decade Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country in the world. 

Unpublished data Erdogan collected in January 2023 for the “Syrian Barometer,” an annual survey he conducts, showed that 28.5% of Turks see Syrians as the number one problem in Turkey, an increase of 3% from the year before.

But now, Erdogan believes, the earthquakes have cemented in people’s minds the image of Syrians as criminals and a drain on public services.

Throughout Antakya, Syrians living in camps dotted around the city told me stories that echoed Mouna’s experience of discrimination. One woman, heavily pregnant, was hit so hard in the stomach by a group of Turkish men that she lost her baby. Another woman told me her son was beaten by military officers who accused him of stealing. She showed me photos on her phone of a child’s mangled and bruised limbs.

But there are also many stories of Turks and Syrians helping one another to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Mouna told me she knew Turkish people who remained kind and supportive. But the rise in anti-Syrian sentiment is evident and impossible to ignore.

A Turkish man I met in Hatay province boasted that he had shot a looter in the leg. He suspected the man was Syrian. “How could you tell?” I asked. “From his mustache,” the man replied.

The earthquakes have caused a massive spike in anti-Syrian hate speech online, said Dilan Tasmedir, who runs Medya ve Goc Dernegi, an organization that monitors rhetoric about migrants in the Turkish media. Slogans like “We don’t want Syrians” and “No longer welcome” trended on Twitter. The comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on the platform: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While some criticized the comment for its divisiveness, the tweet racked up more than 280,000 likes.

When protests against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria erupted into a civil war in 2011, millions fled the country. Turkey’s tiny refugee population mushroomed as the Turkish president welcomed Syrians into the country as guests. “When a people is persecuted,” Erdogan declared, “especially people that are our relatives, our brothers, and with whom we share a 910 km border, we absolutely cannot pretend nothing is happening and turn our backs.”

When Erdogan allowed Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey, he was breaking with a long nativist tradition in his country of not accepting high numbers of refugees. But he also now had a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Europe.

In 2016, a year after Europe faced its largest migrant crisis since World War II, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey in which the country received six billion euros to help with improving conditions for refugees. Turkish nationals were granted visa-free travel to Europe, and, in return, Ankara agreed to prevent refugees from leaving Turkey illegally for Greece and to take back refugees who had left Turkey illegally and been turned away at EU borders. The aim was for the EU to process the asylum requests of Syrian refugees while they awaited a decision in Turkey instead of trying to cross illegally into Greece. But the EU was slow to hold up its end of the bargain, keeping the flow of immigrants granted entry into European countries to a trickle. 

Erdogan temporarily reneged on the deal in 2020, letting migrants pass through Turkey to Greece. He said that the EU was providing inadequate support. By 2021, about 28,000 Syrians had been resettled in Europe, well below the maximum threshold of 72,000 outlined in the original agreement.

The EU deal prompted a shift in attitudes inside Turkey, as it dawned on many Turks that their Syrian “guests” were in fact not there temporarily, but permanently, said Tasmedir of Medya ve Goc Dernegi. More than 200,000 Syrians have been granted citizenship in Turkey since 2011. And many will vote for the first time during the May 14 general election. Opposition groups claim that Erdogan granted these Syrians citizenship in an attempt to expand his own electoral base.

Erdogan could use all the extra votes he can get. Public frustration over Turkey’s economic crisis, botched earthquake relief efforts and endemic corruption have all weakened Erdogan’s appeal to the point that defeat in the first round seems like a distinct possibility. The pressure of the election on both the government and opposition parties is extremely high, and the hot button topic of much of the campaigning has been the nationwide hostility toward Syrian refugees.

Regardless of political ideology, Turkish political parties are now promising to send refugees back to Syria. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old economist and social democratic politician, is Erdogan’s main contender for the presidency. He’s promised to “fulfill people’s longing for democracy,” repair strained relations with the West and unseat Erdogan. He’s also said that returning Syrians to Syria within two years is one of his top goals. Kilicdaroglu’s party,​​ the Republican People’s Party, is the largest in a coalition of opposition parties called the National Alliance. While Kilicdaroglu has a lead on Erdogan in most polls, the results of the first round of voting are expected to be close.

Then there’s the Victory Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant party formed in 2021, with only one representative currently in the Turkish parliament. But, Ankara University professor Murat Erdogan told me, it has had a “profound effect” on political discourse.

Last month, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the Victory Party and its sole representative, tweeted a video of a group of people he implied were Syrians. He depicted them as Arab invaders who, he said, would transport the “Middle East's understanding of religion, culture of violence, humiliation of women, rape of children, rape of boys, drugs” to Turkey. Ozdag’s central policy proposal is to expel all Syrians from Turkey within one year.

In January, the Victory Party began its “Bus to Damascus” fundraising campaign, in which it asked supporters to name people they wanted returned to Syria and to provide donations for bus tickets. As people across the region sought shelter just days after the earthquakes hit in February, Ozdag began accusing Syrians of looting and called for the police and soldiers to shoot looters on sight. In one instance, he shared a video on Twitter of a live news broadcast which he claimed showed a Syrian man stealing a phone during rescue operations. 

Ozdag later admitted he was wrong but refused to apologize, even after it emerged that the man was a Turkish volunteer helping with the search-and-rescue operations. One Turkish rescue worker became so frustrated with Ozdag’s divisive rhetoric that he confronted him on camera. “We, whether Muslim or Christian, are fed up with hearing this sort of talk,” the man told Ozdag.

In Europe and the United States, the question of how to deal with refugees has been highly polarizing, with voters’ views on migration often correlating with where they might be placed on the political spectrum. In the U.K., for example, voters on the left tend to be less hardline on immigration than voters on the right. But in Turkey, the desire to send Syrians back is now the status quo, receiving widespread support from an estimated 85% of voters. In some cases, I found that voters on the left express even more hostility toward refugees than those on the right.

At a May 6 rally held by Kilicdaroglu’s party, I spoke with several younger supporters of the social democratic candidate who saw Arab migrants as an existential threat to liberal secular values. Nida Koksaldi, a 21-year-old architecture student, told me she supports the Republican People’s Party because she supports women's rights, animal rights and LGBTQ rights. Had I met Koksaldi in California, I might have expected her to have included refugees in that list. But she agrees with Kilicdaroglu’s proposed policy of expelling Syrians. They are violent, she said of migrants generally, bad for Turkish society and bad for women’s rights. “They even rape us,” she told me. 

Friedrich Puttmann, a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, believes that much of the resentment toward Syrians is rooted in Turkey’s own struggle for its identity. The Republican People’s Party was the party of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who espoused a philosophy of secularism and encouraged Turks to look to the West as a model. Kemalists, who support Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, tend to be more liberal and firmly support women’s rights. Historically, voters who support the party have feared cultural influence from the Arab world, which is often painted by Kemalist politicians as uniformly conservative and patriarchal. 

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is more aligned with religiously conservative voters, and therefore, according to Puttmann, has historically been more closely linked with Arab culture. Prior to the Syrian civil war, in the early years of Erdogan’s leadership, the country had already become more economically tied to Arab states. So when hundreds of thousands of Syrians entered Turkey as refugees, supporters of the Republican People’s Party were already angry at what they saw as the “Arabization'' of Turkey.

Over time, as more Syrians have come to the country, voters in both blocks have become increasingly hostile toward Syrians. Supporters of Erdogan’s party, torn between their duty toward fellow Muslims and their resentment over cultural differences and the economic impact of migration, have begun reframing Syrians as bad Muslims. 

More secular Turkish people see the presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as evidence of a cultural shift that has occurred under the Justice and Development Party, with Turkey becoming a more conservative, religious and Arabicized country. They see Syrians as part of a system that has eroded Turkey’s secular, liberal identity, Puttmann says. This perception seems to ignore the fact that many Syrians are also secular and liberal.

In an attempt to match the opposition’s rhetoric on returning Syrian refugees to Syria and in the face of mounting public pressure, Erdogan’s government has shifted its policies. Last year, Erdogan announced a plan to send up to a million refugees back to Syria, though the country is still at war. There have been reports that the Assad regime has tortured and disappeared refugees who returned to the country. Reports also emerged last year of Syrians being arrested and forced into northern Syria at gunpoint by Turkish officials. More recently, Erdogan has begun trying to negotiate with the Assad regime to reach a deal that would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. Assad’s precondition for any settlement is that Turkey withdraw its troops from the parts of northern Syria that it has controlled since 2016 following successive military operations aimed at limiting Kurdish control of the region.

Kilicdaroglu says he will negotiate with Assad and is widely seen as a more appealing negotiating partner for the isolated dictator. Kilicdaroglu has also said he will withdraw Turkish troops from northern Syria, secure his country's border and repatriate Syrians — as long as Turkey’s security requirements in northern Syria are met.

Back in Antakya, the election feels like a battle fought in a distant land. Political posters with gleaming candidates are the only new and shiny objects in an empty, dust-covered city. Most Syrians living in the camps are too focused on surviving from one day to the next to concern themselves with elections they can do little to influence.

More than a decade after the first Syrians fled the civil war and arrived in Turkey, it is hard to find hope among the refugees in Antakya. What future they might have had, they say, has disappeared with the earthquakes.

Mouna told me she brought her kids to Turkey so that they could have a better future than in Syria. Now she fears they have none in a country that doesn’t want them. But Mouna also recalled that when she first arrived in Turkey, people were hospitable and she was able to make friends. “And I think this will happen again,” she said, “because not all the people are bad.”

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Disinformation in the Czech Republic has boosted vaccine skepticism and whittled away at public support for the government’s pro-Ukraine policies. Although the country has been targeted by Chinese and Russian disinformation, much of the information pollution that seeps into peoples’ homes is generated by around 39 Czech websites. The people behind these platforms seek a mix of advertising profits and societal influence, undermining legitimate news outlets and eroding trust between the electorate and the government in the process. 

Despite having a vibrant news landscape with audiences engaging with TV and print journalism, significant numbers of Czechs have been swayed by pro-Russian narratives. It’s a situation connected to both the history of the country, which was under communist rule until 1989, and to the success of disinformation campaigns targeting societal fears. The war in Ukraine and the uncertainty it has created across the region have exacerbated the spread of false narratives.

The situation has become so bad that countering disinformation and strengthening public media became important campaign promises for Prime Minister Petr Fiala in the 2021 election, but have resulted in largely failed policies.  

Disinformation experts point to several reasons for this outcome. Fiala leads a five-party coalition government, which can find little consensus on how best to counter disinformation. Moves to tackle false narratives have also been met with concerns about censorship and free speech, even from within Fiala’s own party, the Civic Democratic Party. When the government asked Czech internet services to block eight websites known to push out pro-Russia narratives following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it energized Fiala’s opponents who believed the move signaled an authoritarian bent.

More urgent issues, such as energy prices, have diverted government attention from efforts to counter disinformation. And a lack of consistent action by social media companies, which play a pivotal role in the spread of disinformation in the Czech Republic, has fueled apathy. In late March, the government of the Czech Republic, along with allies from across Central and Eastern Europe, sent a letter to tech firms urging them to do more to counter disinformation by rejecting revenue from sanctioned individuals and boosting accurate information through its algorithms. 

“Until the end of this winter, the Czech government was running in crisis mode” because of the neighboring war in Ukraine, said Jonas Syrovatka, a researcher at Masaryk University in the south of the Czech Republic. He added that there has been a “lack of political courage” to make substantive policy changes. 

The effects of disinformation on Czech society are hard to miss. Not only has information pollution affected vaccine uptake, it has also drawn people onto the streets in anti-government demonstrations. Spurred on by narratives that Fiala’s government is putting support for Ukraine ahead of the welfare of Czech citizens, over 70,000 people turned out to protest in September 2022. Scattered among the crowd were individuals who subscribed to pro-Russian narratives and called for an end to sanctions against Russia. Veronika Kratka Spalkov, a disinformation specialist at the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me the demonstrations aimed to “create a gap between Czech citizens and Ukrainian refugees” in particular.

A promising step by the Czech government in the battle against disinformation came in March 2022 with the creation of a position of media and disinformation commissioner. But from the outset, there was confusion about the role, which combined two portfolios — strategic communication and disinformation. Soon after becoming the first commissioner, Michal Klima led a small team that drafted an action plan to increase the effectiveness of proposed laws that would shut down government-identified disinformation websites when there was an immediate threat to national security. The plan also proposed increasing financial support for anti-disinformation nonprofits working in media education and cutting off the advertising that the government spends on websites that engage in disinformation.

The path to government advertising on disinformation is a complicated one: State-owned companies, such as the Czech post office, would buy so-called “programmatic advertising” packages from organizations such as Google while not knowing where the ads will appear. In the Czech Republic, disinformation sites can have a high volume of traffic Spalkov told me.

Shortly after Klima’s action plan was circulated, it was denounced by disinformation hawks and perceived by a distrustful electorate as a government attempt to censor the media and curtail free speech. Almost as soon as Klima was hired, the media and disinformation commissioner role was scrapped by the government and the disinformation portfolio was moved to the jurisdiction of the government's national security advisor. 

Disinformation in the Czech Republic is complex and dynamic, according to Syrovatka, the researcher from Masaryk University. It usually originates on free-access websites whose anatomy is wholly composed of false information. It is then amplified across social media. Telegram has also become an important platform for disinformation circulation.

The Czech Republic is also host to a novel mechanism for the spread of disinformation: email chains. With around one-third of the Czech population receiving these threads straight into their inbox, they have been effective in creating hysteria around key issues such as vaccines and migration. This method of communication has become popular among older people and allowed Czech disinformation to bypass mainstream media and successfully appeal to a receptive audience. “We have a chain email problem, and I think we are the only country in the world with this problem,” Veronika Spalkova of the European Values Centre for Security Policy, told me. “These emails target peoples’ emotions, and they play a role in important events in this country.” 

It’s not just email chains, text messages laden with disinformation have been successful in fueling hysteria. In early January, people in the Czech Republic began to receive messages that claimed to be from Petr Pavel, the presidential candidate. The content falsely said that they were being mobilized to fight in Ukraine, and it set off enough panic to warrant a response from the police.

The post Why the Czech government can’t beat back online disinformation appeared first on Coda Story.

India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abstaining from voting on half a dozen resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly that called for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and end the war. In a tightrope balancing act, India has stated that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity" of the countries involved must be respected while simultaneously maintaining close defense and economic ties with Russia. A recent report from a Finnish think tank named India one of five “laundromat” countries that have significantly increased their imports of Russian crude oil, which they go on to sell — in the form of refined oil products — to other countries, including those in Europe that have committed to helping restrict Russia’s revenue stream from fossil fuel sales.

This was the diplomatic backdrop against which a small Ukrainian cultural festival was held in the Indian capital Delhi last week — a tentative step toward the people-to-people contact Dzhaparova described. I met Masha Kondakova, a Ukrainian film director, at a screening of her 2020 documentary, “Inner Wars.” In 2017, Kondakova began to follow three Ukrainian women who served on the battlefield, two as combatants in the Donbas region, fighting against pro-Russian separatists, and one as a doctor in the Ukrainian army. The resulting film is a rare and urgent look at life as a woman on the front lines of war.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

I saw a lot of movies about war from the male gaze. I always saw the men as the main characters, and I thought, ‘no, wait a second,’ and I discovered that there are women fighters on the front lines in Ukraine. When I started to work on the movie in 2017, we had limited positions for women in the army.

For example, even if a woman was a sniper or working in a mortar squad, she would be registered as a kitchen worker or someone making clothes. This meant even if women were joining as fighters or combatants, we would not receive the same treatment as male soldiers. If you’re a veteran, the government helps you. It’s not the same if you’re registered as working in the kitchen. By 2018, things changed. The women that I filmed joined the army when there were no positions for them as combatants. So these rare women warriors had to be brave enough to fight at the front line and also brave enough to fight for their rights within the army. These women proved they had a place in the army.

I wanted to give these women their voices, to show their faces, to show that women too are war heroes.

You said things changed for women in the army in Ukraine in 2018. What specific challenges do women soldiers defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion now face?

Women form about 23% of the army in Ukraine. It’s huge. Today we have more than 50,000 women who serve in the army. Around 7,000 are fighters on the front line. There are many more women now who are combatants in the war. This is voluntary. It’s not an obligation, it’s a choice. The army has never been adapted to suit women. But women are resilient. A friend of mine, an actress, learned how to be a first responder and give medical help on the battlefield. Also, there are a lot of women who have learned how to shoot. Until the beginning of 2022, before the invasion, even the uniform was not adapted for a woman’s body. All of that is changing now.  

Are any of the women you filmed in 2017 on the front lines again? Have you been in touch with them?

Yes. One of the women I followed, Elena, was in Bakhmut. She is a senior sergeant in the mortar battery in the Donetsk region. When I spoke to her, she told me about this terrible moment when her 10-year-old son called her at 4 a.m. and said that he was scared. There were explosions in Kharkiv, where he lives. She was defending the country, she told me. But at that moment, she couldn’t protect her son.

You live in Paris now, but you still have family in Kyiv. When were you last able to visit them?

My father and mother are physicians. My sister is a pianist. They never talk too dramatically about the war. My mother and sister temporarily joined me in Paris, but my father didn’t want to leave Ukraine. He is 70 years old. He can’t fight but he said, “I will at least protect my house.” I last went to Ukraine in August. I heard the sirens. It was powerful and kind of scary. I visited places where buildings were destroyed, where it was horrible like in Hostomel and Bucha. But people were still walking around. People were still kissing on the street. Life is stronger than death, that’s what I learned.

On your visit to India, what sort of response have you received about the war in Ukraine?

I met two people who were very supportive, who told me they felt ‘very, very sorry.’ These people were young. I met one tuk-tuk driver who was around 60 years old and spoke Russian. He said, ‘I talked to Vladimir Putin and he said everything will be okay.’ I said, ‘Oh great, for which country?’ There is a war. We are free to take positions, and I respect that. But when he said, ‘Ukraine and Russia are together,’ I had to say, ‘no, it’s been a long time, almost a century.’

I don’t judge anyone. But if somebody believes Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia, please educate yourself. I know Russian propaganda is very strong. I also know that Russia and India have a long relationship. From my point of view, supporting Ukraine doesn’t mean you become an enemy of Russia. But when innocent people are dying in Ukraine, children, women, I don’t understand the tolerance. Ukrainians showed from the very beginning of the invasion that they wanted to remain sovereign. They don’t want to be the slaves of Russian imperialists.

The post Documenting the women warriors of Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

“We’re a Russian-speaking media,” Rakovitsa told me as we settled in at the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel in central Kyiv, now a hub for foreign journalists reporting on the war as the world looks on. Born and raised in Mariupol, Rakovitsa is also in the business of storytelling, but her audience is closer to the action than most.

The Institute’s online newsroom, News of Donbas, is aimed at people in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories.

“In order to reach our audience, we don’t use hate speech,” Rakovitsa told me. “We use the principles of conflict-sensitive journalism, and we don’t label people as orcs and Rashists,” she said, referring to the slang epithets that many Ukrainian media now use to describe Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

As the war grinds on into its second year, Ukraine’s news organizations have worked hard to showcase the brutality of Russian military forces and to keep the war on the international agenda. In the reporting of smaller media based in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians who have Russian sympathies or are apathetic about living under Moscow’s hand are still somewhat present. But they have all but disappeared from coverage by outlets that are considered mainstream.

Rakovitsa’s organization is working to show how people in eastern Ukraine are experiencing the war and to counter the relentless tide of pro-Russian disinformation. They do this by reporting straight facts in a style that is bone dry, in both Russian and Ukrainian.

Among Ukrainian media, their approach stands out. And it is exactly what some people are looking for. Since the invasion, News of Donbas and its sister YouTube channel have seen their audience numbers skyrocket. People living under occupation have engaged with the newsroom’s mix of news updates and short features. And Russians hungry for facts have driven traffic to the YouTube channel in particular. More than 70% of the channel’s 169,000 subscribers are logging on from Russia, although some portion of this figure is likely Ukrainians who were forcibly moved to Russia over the course of 2022.

In the past, the organization’s divergence from the norm has led to criticism or doubt from other media outlets. Before the war, much was made of News of Donbas’ decision to publish photographs of Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed leader of the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic. The site also ran a photo of the region’s unofficial flag, a move that some saw as legitimizing Pushilin’s initiative. But since the war began in 2022 Ukraine’s journalists have united around a common enemy.

“The journalists in this country started a marathon of coverage over a year ago,” Rakovitsa told me between swigs of her non-alcoholic beer. “24/7 we’re covering this story and in so many ways it has brought us together. At times, yes, there are people who still criticize us, but I understand that they are also suffering from this war.” Ukrainian journalists, she said, are living with “nerves with no skin,” covering a war that is challenging their very existence as a people.

The Institute first launched in 2009, with a goal of shining light on corruption and life in Donetsk. In 2014, the work expanded to a YouTube channel, which focused on the Maidan revolution and human rights violations that proliferated as fighting erupted between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian government. With the majority of its reporters from eastern Ukraine, the newsroom became adept at obtaining and explaining information about what was happening inside occupied territories.

Now funded by major Western donors like the Council of Europe and USAID, the non-profit has developed various arms, including a think tank, the annual Donbas Media Forum and Crimea Today, a separate news outlet that focuses on communities in the annexed peninsula. “Our audience there watches us, trusts us, knows we are pro-Ukrainian media,” said Rakovitsa. “We don’t say they are fools and blame them for Russia’s actions,” she said.

This, too, sets them apart from the norm. Further west, many believe that a lack of local resistance to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea helped set the stage for the 2022 invasion. 

Rakovitsa sees her organization’s work as integral to Ukraine’s future and thinks that discussions about what to do after the war need to start now, even as the battles rage on. People liberated from the occupied territories will have to be weaned off a robust diet of Russian propaganda, she told me.

Indeed, the Ukrainian information sphere has become highly charged, with people quick to judge one another and seemingly eager at times to define who has betrayed Ukraine and who has not. In the occupied territories, people are also experiencing wartime fervor, but for many, it is mediated instead by Russian propaganda. Rakovitsa expects that whenever the war ends, those who have only been fed the Russian side of the story will have a deeply distorted view of what has happened. She worries that this clash of narratives could result in a whole new round of conflict. 

“We need to ensure that there is no second war after the first one,” she said to me, a few times over.

In February 2022, the organization’s offices moved west following the invasion. In total, 50 staff members work under Rakovitsa. Most are now working remotely, due to the constant threat of shelling. And new obstacles arise each day. But the sense of mission is palpable and sustaining. 

“The people we are reporting to, they are our people,” Rakovitsa said to me, as we walked out of the hotel doors and onto the street. “We’re fighting for them.”

CORRECTION [04/28/2023 10:20 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said that the offices of the Donetsk Institute of Information moved west amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The editorial offices moved west in February 2022.

The post The Ukrainian journalists on the front lines of Russian propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

Almost two months later, Kocer is still being investigated and does not know if he will be sent to trial under a controversial law, the so-called disinformation law, which criminalizes the spreading of false or misleading information. If convicted, Kocer could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Critics say the disinformation law, passed in October 2022, is the latest example of the gradual dismantling of democratic freedoms in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has run the country for over two decades now.

As Turkey approaches its presidential election on May 14, the disinformation law, which was used to silence journalists in the aftermath of the earthquakes, casts a shadow over free speech in what some Turkish people see as the most important election in the Republic’s 100-year history.

On election day, the state will use the law to suppress the reporting of what is happening at polling stations and justify detentions and arrests, said Baris Altintas, the co-director of the Media and Law Studies Association, a non-profit organization which offers legal assistance to journalists in Turkey. The Turkish government might also initiate internet shutdowns, website blockings and bans on Twitter accounts, she told me. 

One of the most controversial changes under the disinformation law was an amendment to the Turkish criminal code called Article 217. It states that people can be imprisoned for up to three years for disseminating false information related to the country's domestic and foreign security. The law specifies that the false information has to be related to the “internal and external security, public order and general health of the country” to be considered a crime.

What this means in practice is unclear — which may be the point.

“Such wording, within the Turkish context can refer to anything and everything and often concepts such as external security and/or national security as well as public order are taken lightly,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The law states that disinformation must be distributed in a way that disturbs public peace, with the motive of creating concern, fear and panic among the public. But, Akdeniz explains, it does not define anxiety, fear or panic, leaving its interpretation up to public prosecutors who consider whether to bring forward a case, as well as the criminal courts if an indictment is issued.

Turkey has low levels of judicial independence, with most judges appointed by the president and the parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s party, the AKP, and its coalition of allied parties.

Unpublished research by the Media and Law Studies Association shows that six journalists were detained under Article 217 for their work covering the aftermath of the earthquakes. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only Iran, China and Myanmar currently jail more journalists than Turkey.

The earthquakes, which killed more than 45,000 people in Turkey alone and destroyed around 214,000 buildings, have put the AKP under immense pressure in the lead up to the elections. The party has been accused of undermining construction safeguards, thus worsening the impact of the earthquakes. It has also been criticized for overseeing a chaotic response to the disaster, fueling widespread anger against what many see as a corrupt government.

In response, the government has described its critics as “provocateurs” and shut down access to social media sites, including homegrown sites, on some service providers, all while people were using these platforms to search for survivors.

Two journalists arrested in February, Ali and Ibrahim Imat, were reportedly only released on Friday, having spent weeks awaiting trial for allegedly spreading fake news. The brothers had raised allegations that the Turkish authorities in Osmaniye were withholding tents from people made homeless by the earthquakes.

On at least two occasions, when reporting from the earthquake-affected region, Mir Ali Kocer said he was confronted by police officers in order to stop him from filming. One incident was caught on camera. This was something several journalists have reported experiencing.

When he was summoned to the police station, the policemen told Kocer he was being investigated for spreading disinformation for comments he had posted on social media. According to Kocer the posts that the police showed him included one in which he said he could smell dead bodies.

Kocer told me he was simply sharing information, obtained from survivors of the earthquakes or local officials and the police, which the government refused to share. He said his posts are usually supported with a photo, a video or an interview with someone. Kocer, who refers to the disinformation law as the “censorship law,” believes the police were just trying to intimidate him. But, he told me, he will continue to be a journalist even if he is forced to report from inside a prison.

Prior to the disinformation law, the state already had a wide range of legal tools available to target critical voices, including an anti-terrorism law that has forced dozens of journalists and dissidents to flee while many others have been imprisoned. 

Another law, forbidding people to insult the president, led to 33,973 prosecutions in 2021 alone. Schoolchildren and a former Miss Turkey, the 2006 winner of a national beauty pageant, have been prosecuted under the law. In 2016, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for posting images on Facebook comparing Erdogan to the Lord of the Rings character Gollum.

Often, the anti-terrorism law is used against journalists who make accusations against judges or police officials tasked with combating terrorism, says Ozgur Ogret, the Turkey representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In cases where this charge does not stick, the disinformation law gives the state another way to target the same journalists and imprison them for doing the thing that is, by definition, their job — spreading information.

In December 2022, Sinan Aygul became the first journalist to be arrested under the disinformation law, after he posted a tweet accusing police officers and soldiers of sexually abusing a child. He later retracted the story for inaccuracies.

Aygul could have been charged by the police for making targets of those who are tasked to combat terrorism, said Ogret. But instead the state decided to use the disinformation law.

The impact of the law extends beyond journalists. Hundreds of people had legal proceedings initiated against them and dozens were detained for spreading “provocative” posts on social media in the wake of the earthquakes. It is unclear at this stage how many of these people were held under Article 217, but it is likely that a lot of them were detained using the law, said Altintas, the director of the Media and Law Studies Association.

Article 217 poses a bigger threat to NGOs, academics and ordinary citizens than journalists, who are more seasoned in dealing with the state and have been targeted for years using a mixture of laws, Altintas told me. Now the disinformation law means anything anyone tweets or says can be used against them.

The disinformation law also imposes heavy sanctions, including six-month bans on advertising, on social media platforms that fail to comply with content removal requests from prosecutors or the courts. These same companies are also obliged to provide user data, when requested, in relation to specific crimes, including when people are accused of disseminating fake news.

The authorities can limit access to social media platforms by slowing down the speed of the service for non-compliance with these requests. The platforms have been put in a further bind as they are now required to set up subsidiaries in Turkey, making them more criminally, administratively and financially liable. “The disinformation law forces social media platforms to be complicit in the state’s censorship regime,” said Suay Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international human rights organization that promotes freedom of expression.

The opposition in Turkey, after years of elections riddled with fraud, have become highly organized in election monitoring, in which social media plays a vital role, allowing citizens to share information on irregularities, including ballot stuffing, violence and the deliberate miscounting of votes. The new disinformation law makes it easier for the government to remove content en masse or to clamp down on the social media sites themselves — a real possibility, says Bolougouris, as Erdogan, who is lagging behind the opposition in the polls, scrambles to find a way to secure his presidency.

“The implications of these amendments go beyond Turkey,” she told me. “Because if Turkey is able to implement these amendments without a strong pushback from platforms, for example, it will set a dangerous precedent and it will have implications for the open functioning of social media around the world.”

Turkish government officials have over the years been keen to draw parallels between Turkey’s internet laws and a law in Germany, referred to as NetzDG. The German law has been heavily criticized for requiring social media companies to comply with content takedown requests from German authorities. But Boulougouris disagrees with the comparison, saying that the operating environment in Turkey, with its weaker institutions and judiciary, is totally different from Germany.

As the election approaches, the opposition is looking more unified, with six parties backing one candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The opposition have rallied around pledges to implement constitutional changes that roll back presidential powers, crack down on corruption and give state media organizations back their independence and impartiality.

But Yaman Akdeniz, the law professor, cautions against being overly optimistic that these changes will be implemented if the opposition wins. Turkey has a long history of censorship, he told me, “don’t expect this to be a smooth process.”

The post As elections near, Turkey weaponizes the law to suppress speech appeared first on Coda Story.

The videos were fake, said the Tamil Nadu police. A controversy had been manufactured, said the Tamil Nadu government, by politicians from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. “The spread of fake videos,” said the state’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, on March 10, “was initiated by BJP leaders from North India.” He accused these unnamed leaders of having an “ulterior motive,” of trying to create unrest just after he had “spoken about anti-BJP parties uniting.”

With the BJP, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, firm favorites to win a third consecutive national election in 2024, most analysts deem the formation of an ad hoc alliance of regional parties and the fast-fading Congress — which has governed India for the vast majority of its 75 years as an independent nation — as the opposition’s only hope.

If Modi remains by far India’s most popular politician, there is little love lost for him in Tamil Nadu. For years, whenever he visited the state, he would be greeted with signs that read, “Go back Modi.” But the BJP, which has never had an electoral presence at any level in Tamil Nadu, surprised observers last year by winning several seats in municipal elections in the state. It led the party’s state chief to declare his intent to turn the BJP into a third political force in a state that has been dominated by two parties since the 1960s, both of which emerged from an equal rights movement for oppressed castes. Despite the progress made last year, the BJP is currently in disarray in Tamil Nadu, with 13 party workers quitting dramatically just last week.

Meanwhile, Bihar is currently led by an anti-BJP coalition. In August 2022, the state’s chief minister walked out on an alliance with the BJP and formed a new government with other partners including the Congress. The fake videos of Bihari laborers being attacked in Tamil Nadu were spread by BJP supporters, politicians from both states said, to drive a wedge between parties in both states that were opposed to the BJP.

Sylendra Babu, the extravagantly mustached head of the Tamil Nadu police, told me that he had to form 46 special teams to coordinate with the Bihar police to combat the viral spread of videos and social media commentary about attacks on Bihari laborers. “It was a war-like situation,” Babu said. 

Arrayed against the police in both Tamil Nadu and Bihar were right-wing influencers with followings of up to 60 million people, local BJP politicians and even some media. The Hindi-language Dainik Bhaskar newspaper — the largest circulated daily in India and by some estimates the fourth largest in the world — reported that more than 15 Bihari laborers had been murdered in Tamil Nadu. The article was based on a single phone call with a laborer and the accompanying video showing clips of unrelated violence.

Following up on the report, a BJP spokesperson tweeted that Bihari laborers were being attacked and killed for speaking Hindi in Tamil Nadu. To counter the misinformation, the Tamil Nadu police took to Twitter to threaten legal action against anyone it found to be deliberately making false posts. Babu himself posted a video on Twitter describing the claims that Bihari workers were being attacked in Tamil Nadu as “false and mischievous.” 

Bihar, linguistically and culturally, is part of India’s so-called “cow belt” — including the Hindi-speaking states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in particular. Back in the 1980s, an Indian academic coined the pejorative acronym BIMARU to refer to these states, a pun on the Hindi word “bimar,” meaning ill or sick. These states lag behind the rest of the country, particularly the south, in terms of prosperity and education.

Tamil Nadu is a southern state. Like its neighbors, it outperforms the North when it comes to providing healthcare, education and jobs to its residents. But the Hindi-speaking northern states dominate national politics, a dominance that has become even more stark since the Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, gobbling up votes in the region at an unprecedented scale.

States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala have always been fiercely vigilant that their languages be recognized as integral to the Indian union. Many in the South prefer to communicate in English as their pan-Indian link language rather than Hindi. But Modi, critics point out, has not disguised his ambition to make Hindi the country’s national language. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, while giving Hindi and English “official” language status. English, therefore, is equal to Hindi as a language of government communication. 

By trying to further privilege Hindi, Modi and his closest political ally, Home Minister Amit Shah, have been accused of inflaming tensions with the south. Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister, has himself written to Modi to demand that the latter stop his “continuous efforts to promote Hindi in the name of one nation.” Stalin described attempts to “impose” Hindi as “divisive in character” and warned against provoking another “language war.” Tamil Nadu has a long history of resisting the adoption of Hindi as the language of government.

While Hindi is by far the single most spoken language in India, there are hundreds of millions who do not speak it and who fear being at a disadvantage were learning Hindi to become compulsory. The rumors and fake videos tapped into the prejudices and resentments of both Hindi speakers and those in the south who speak entirely different languages and write with a different alphabet. The videos made national headlines because they appeared to expose yet another historical division still resonant in contemporary India.

S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, told me that the politics of the BJP is inherently opposed to the federalism that has long characterized politics in Tamil Nadu. The BJP, she said, “is against autonomy, democratization of language, and plurality of culture and religion.” 

The fomenting of social media outrage over the last couple of weeks provides an insight into what campaigning might look like over the next year as the general election approaches. The journalist Arun Sinha, author of “Battle for Bihar,” an inside look at the state’s politics, told me that the level of organization shown over the last few weeks, as fake videos were spread about anti-migrant violence in Tamil Nadu, suggests that the BJP wants to establish itself as the voice of the large population of disenfranchised Bihari migrant workers.

Spreading rumors about anti-migrant feelings in states like Tamil Nadu and maligning the non-BJP coalition government of Bihar as unresponsive, he said, “is like killing two birds with one stone.” And, as ever, the BJP’s tight control of the social media narrative in India helps it to advance its electoral goals. The question is whether the opposition can, as it tried to do in Tamil Nadu, effectively marshal social media to stop the spread of disinformation.

The post Fake videos of mob violence deepen India’s North-South divide appeared first on Coda Story.

Now in her third year at Kozminski University, Wesolowska has a front row seat to observe what she describes as moral corruption seeping into Polish law facilities. Seasoned academics duel with opportunist colleagues willing to parrot the right-wing government’s line in order to collect low-hanging promotions. “There are two teams of professors,” she told me when we met in central Warsaw. “One that does things in the right way, and another more dangerous team. You learn how to accept that you can’t be outspoken because there is a possibility it could affect your exam results.”

This is a silent element of Poland’s descent into a rule-of-law crisis: the impact on law students and early-career professionals who, in trying to negotiate bewildering changes and political influencing, have been subject to academic whiplash and relentless government disinformation. The effect has been chilling. Many young Poles in the law field appear to have gone to ground.

Law and Justice came to power in October 2015 with the promise of improving the efficiency of the courts and ridding the country of the remnants of communism. It began to make its presence felt by seeking to influence the composition of the Constitutional Court, a powerful institution with the authority to assess the constitutionality of Polish laws. When five of the Court’s 15 judges were due to retire around the 2015 elections, Law and Justice tried to oust three candidates who had been legally chosen by the outgoing pro-EU Civic Platform party and push through five of their own judicial appointments instead. 

The new government had not only set out to dismiss elected judges but bypassed the Constitutional Court entirely while it was discussing the legality of the Civic Platform judicial candidates. In the end, the Court admitted only two Law and Justice judges, but the chain of events — and the government’s later decision to change the quorum in the Constitutional Court — brought hundreds of people out onto the streets of Warsaw in protest. The Law and Justice party and its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski took no notice.

With the Constitutional Court quickly falling under the influence of the government, Law and Justice turned to the Supreme Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, a body responsible for protecting the independence of judges and courts. In 2017, the government pushed through reforms that gave them control over the process of electing new judges, a key function of the Council of the Judiciary. Around the same time, steps were taken to reduce the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, a move that the Court of Justice of the European Union later said violated EU law. A Disciplinary Chamber was established in 2017, which critics argued was a scheme to intimidate judges who refused to walk the party line. Confronted by this illiberal sea change, the European Union has tried to fight back by withholding funds from the bloc’s sixth largest economy. The results have been mixed. The Disciplinary Chamber was disbanded in July 2022 and replaced with the Chamber of Professional Responsibility. Nonetheless, key legal institutions in Poland are still operating at the whim of the government despite the outcry from Brussels.  

This turmoil has trickled down into the halls of Poland’s public and private universities. A clear example is the approach to teaching. Some professors have continued to teach the law within its political, social and economic context. Others have become hesitant. A few have decided to teach their classes in a vacuum and avoid the rule-of-law crisis and its implications altogether. 

It’s not only teaching in the classroom that has become an issue. According to Dr. Aleksandra Kustra-Rogatka, an associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, in central Poland, the role of academia itself is also up for debate. In the pages of academic journals, a few Polish intellectuals have declared that their role is simply to present the facts and not opinions. Their peers have shot back, arguing that during a constitutional crisis the academic community is duty bound to actively participate in discussions and not hide behind a veil of neutrality. “We cannot say to students anymore that the law is objective and nothing changes, that it’s politically neutral. We must change our way of teaching and what we teach,” Kustra-Rogatka told me.

There have also been moments when political influence on universities has been spectacularly blatant. In 2021, Kozminski University broke off its relationship with Judge Igor Tuleya, 12 months after the 52-year-old was stripped of his immunity and suspended by the Disciplinary Chamber for ruling against the Law and Justice party. The call to suspend Tuleya came from the vice president of a district court in Warsaw, Przemyslaw Radzik, a government ally who is reported to have said that the judge could “demoralize” students.

To get a clearer sense of these events I spoke to Dr. Agnieszka Grzelak, a professor of European law at Kozminski University. We met at Green Café Nero, not far from Poland’s Palace of Culture and Science, on a rainy Warsaw afternoon. Direct in her assessment of the rule-of-law situation in Poland, Grzelak told me that when news emerged of Judge Tuleya’s dismissal, it sent shock waves through Kozminski’s law facility. Almost immediately 18 colleagues came together to write an open letter to the rector, Grzegorz Mazurek, calling for the university to change tack. The “autonomy of the university” was at stake, they wrote. Hours after receiving the correspondence, Judge Tuleya’s agreement with Kozminski was restored, but in many regards the reputational damage was done. “There is a collapse of the rule of law in every aspect. Starting from legislation to the way the law is adopted, to the situation in the parliament, to the situation in the courts, everything you touch there is some problem,” Grzelak said.

Watching these events unfold are Poland’s law students. If the expectation was for the next generation of lawyers to seriously refute the ruling party’s manipulation of democracy, those hopes have been put to bed by their professors. In several discussions I had while researching this story the conclusion by some faculty was that law students have generally shrugged off the rule-of-law crisis. One reason was their communication patterns, with today’s youth living more insular lives governed by the algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. Another was a lack of enthusiasm for proper legal sourcing, with students opting to reference short online texts rather than harvest information from the context-rich pages of legal journals. 

Adam Bodnar, the dean of the law facility at the private SWPS University, told me that students “treat freedom like air” and often struggle to connect the rule-of-law crisis to the future of the country. Of course, there are students, like Katarzyna Wesolowska, who are driven to be a part of the solution. 

I also spoke with Adam Buwelski, an impressive 21-year-old at the University of Warsaw, who, on top of a rigorous schedule of classes, finds time to sit on the law students’ association. He reluctantly agreed with the assertion that his generation could do more to engage with Poland’s constitutional crisis. “There is an anger in us that is often hidden because we are living with this day in, day out,” he said. “There are scandals all the time and as a group we are used to it. We don’t have heated discussions about everything going on. That’s a very different position to our parents and professors who are discussing everything all the time. We’re calm but, yes, I don’t think that’s a good thing.” 

Certain issues do arouse the attention of supposedly apathetic students. When the Constitutional Court outlawed abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities in October 2020, students took part in the nationwide protests. The issue of LGTBQ+ rights has also sparked outrage as the Law and Justice party and its close ally, the Polish Catholic Church, work relentlessly to strip away the rights of this community. The University of Warsaw has also been embroiled in scandal which ignited students’ frustrations. In January 2023, a lecture by the former deputy commissioner for human rights, Dr. Hanna Machinska, was canceled by the rector weeks after the academic was dismissed from her job. After student protests and a public outcry, the lecture eventually took place, but it was a worrying repeat of a pattern established by the Judge Tuleya case, signaling that critics of the government might not be welcome at universities either.

But the disengagement of students is also grounded in very practical challenges. For individuals wishing to enter the judiciary, the moral corruption of the Council of the Judiciary has the ability to undermine their hard work. In order to be nominated for a role in the courts, trainee judges must be proposed by the Council to the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, a close ally of the Law and Justice party. The fear among students is that when the Law and Justice party is finally voted out, they will be seen as tainted judges despite their education and personal beliefs. “[When] starting a career as a judge or a prosecutor, legal jobs connected to the public system of education run by the Ministry of Justice, the students doubt if they should start it,” Grzelak, the professor in EU law, told me. “They ask: What if I graduate from training, will I become a judge or will I become a fake judge?”

On everyones’ minds in Poland at the moment are the 2023 parliamentary elections. Should Law and Justice continue in office for another four years, the party will continue to damage to democratic values and institutions in Poland. Up against opposition parties who have so far failed to ignite any real fervor across the country, Law and Justice candidates are leading in the polls. For Buwelski and his peers at the University of Warsaw, many are getting ready to vote for The Left, a small political alliance of leftist parties. In some law students’ eyes, the salient issues affecting Poland’s younger generation, such as rising house prices and inflation, are not addressed to suit the needs of their generation. Law and Justice, Buwelski says, caters to their base, and the opposition to anyone who doesn’t like the ruling party. No one takes much time to think about the youth and their future. 

But even if the election spells the end for Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his band of spoilers, Poland won’t be out of the woods. The damage being done to the rule of law has been so great that it will take more than one term in office to rectify it. For Katarzyna Wesolowska, the student in Kozminski University who will graduate in 2025, that means the road to fixing her country won’t be easy.

The post Poland’s rule of law crisis threatens the integrity of its universities appeared first on Coda Story.

His crime? To have been one among dozens of journalists from around the country to have made a beeline for Uttar Pradesh in 2020, to the district of Hathras where a 19-year-old Dalit woman had been gang raped. Dalits are on the lowest rung of the Indian caste ladder and were once referred to as “untouchables.” The young woman died two weeks after the rape in a hospital in Delhi. As protests gathered steam, police compounded the outrage felt around the country by attempting to hastily cremate the woman’s body in the middle of the night — forcibly, according to the family; “as per the family’s wishes,” according to the police.

The rape and murder and the perceived police indifference led to expressions of anger, horror and disgust across India. While many compared the case to a gang rape and murder in Delhi in 2012 that led to several legislative reforms, others pointed out that there is a long and gruesome history in India of upper caste violence against lower castes, much of which has gone unpunished.

An established journalist of several years’ experience, Kappan told me, just days after his release, that “like any Delhi-based journalist,” he too wanted to travel to Hathras to report on a story of national interest, a story that threatened to spill over into caste unrest. But the Uttar Pradesh government, led by a hardline Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath — a star within the Bharatiya Janata Party firmament, outshone say some observers only by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — was wary of the political fallout after some right wing groups, including a former BJP legislator, expressed support for the alleged rapists.  

Kappan had traveled to Hathras with activists linked to the Popular Front of India (PFI), a politically radical Muslim group. He had written for the PFI’s Malayalam-language publication Thejas in the past. The PFI, which was banned in India last year, was accused by mainstream Indian media of pumping over $12 million into trying to foment riots in Hathras, claims that were later denied by authorities. At the time though, Kappan’s supposed PFI connections led him to being dubbed a “journarrist” on social media (a terrorist masked as a journalist).

Mohamed K.S. Danish, a Supreme Court lawyer and part of Kappan’s legal team, told me that he believes Kappan was “made a scapegoat” by the Uttar Pradesh government to tamp down growing dissent. The police charged Kappan with crimes under the most stringent sections of Indian law, including a draconian anti-terror law which enabled them to hold him for months before they even had to bring him before a judge. Kappan had become, his lawyer said, an easy target for state authorities that were sensitive to criticism and eager to assign blame.

Even before Kappan was arrested, the Uttar Pradesh authorities had taken an adversarial position against the media, barring the girl’s family from speaking to reporters and trying to prevent reporters from traveling to Hathras. It was part of a growing animus between Indian authorities, particularly in states governed by the BJP, and critical journalists. In 2021, just months after the Hathras rape, the website Article 14, which investigates and deeply reports failures of Indian justice, revealed evidence that the use of sedition charges to silence critics had markedly increased since Modi became prime minister in 2014.

Article 14 reported that 96% of sedition charges against 405 Indians in the decade leading up to 2021 had been filed after Modi became prime minister; 149 of those charged were accused of “making ‘critical’ and/or ‘derogatory’ remarks against Modi,” noted the website, while 144 people had been charged for remarks against Yogi Adityanath. Twenty-two cases of sedition were filed after the Hathras rape and murder was covered by the Indian media.

When I spoke to Kappan after his release from prison, he told me he had been beaten by the Uttar Pradesh police, that they had slapped him repeatedly and made absurd, irrelevant accusations. “They tried to force me to admit having links with Maoists and terrorists,” Kappan said. “They asked if I had ever visited Pakistan or if I used to eat beef.” (Indian Muslims are often accused of being “less” Indian than the majority Hindu population because they have no dietary taboo about beef, cows being sacred to some Hindus, and because they supposedly support Pakistan at cricket.)

He also said the police had denied him medication for his illnesses, including diabetes. Kappan caught covid twice while he was in prison and his wife told the Indian press that he was chained to his hospital bed and was not allowed to use the bathroom. Kappan told me he had to urinate into a plastic bottle for a week.

According to his lawyer, the police even tried to produce material Kappan had read about the Black Lives Matter movement as evidence of his intent to create communal unrest in Hathras. “When the prosecution read out this charge of inciting locals in Hathras through English pamphlets about a foreign protest in the Supreme Court, the whole court was laughing,” Kappan’s lawyer said. Blaming social unrest on foreign interference is a familiar trope in India, frequently extended to ridiculous lengths.

In February, 2021, a young climate activist was arrested and accused of sedition because she had circulated a “toolkit” tweeted by Greta Thunberg in support of ongoing farmers’ protests in India. The toolkit, the Delhi police said, as they arrested the activist from her home in Bangalore, was evidence of a conspiracy to “wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India.” Apart from Thunberg, conspirators also included the pop star Rihanna.

Eventually, in September, last year, after Kappan had already been imprisoned for nearly two years, the Supreme Court gave him bail. In its order, the bench noted that “every person has the right to free expression.” Referring to Kappan, the bench said he was trying through his reporting to “show that the victim needs justice,” that ordinary people can ask questions of those in power — “Is that a crime in the eyes of the law?”

Despite the court’s order and its apparent bemusement at Kappan’s incarceration, the authorities took months to release him from prison. He had to secure bail on what his lawyers described as frivolous charges of money-laundering and routine procedures were delayed as if only to prolong Kappan’s time in prison.

Rituparna Chatterjee, the India representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told me that Kappan’s case “is an example of government overreach and the violation of rights. He should never have been arrested in the first place.” She spoke too of the authorities’ “weaponizing of outdated colonial laws such as sedition to harass journalists.” 

In the most recent RSF World Press Freedom Index, India has slipped eight places to rank 150 out of the 180 countries on the list. Kappan’s arrest is an example of why India, despite Modi describing it as the “mother of democracy,” is developing an international reputation for its shrinking freedoms.

“Kappan’s arrest,” says Chatterjee, “was a chilling message from the Uttar Pradesh police to all reporters that there are matters they should not investigate and that it will cost them dear if they do.” RSF has said that the “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy.’”

It’s a position that is echoed by Kunal Majumder, the India representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). “We have been observing,” he told me, “a sharp increase in the number of journalists who have been detained and arrested.”

According to CPJ data, he said, “six out of seven journalists imprisoned in India as of December 1, 2022, are being charged with or being investigated for offenses under the UAPA.” Majumdar is referring to India’s notorious anti-terror law, most recently amended in 2019 to allow the government to designate even individuals as terrorists before proven guilty in a court of law. In 2020, special rapporteurs of the United Nations noted that the amendments were “raising concerns in relation to their compatibility with India’s obligations under international human rights.” They were particularly troubled, they wrote, by “the designation of individuals as ‘terrorists’ in the context of ongoing discrimination directed at religious and other minorities, human rights defenders and political dissidents, against whom the law has been used.”

The prominent Indian politician Shashi Tharoor described the amendment, in a tweet lauding the release of Kappan, as a “menace to democracy.”

Kappan, and the men arrested alongside him, including the driver of their taxi to Hathras, may be out on bail now but their case remains pending. “It is a moment of happiness for us,” said Kappan’s lawyers, “but we have to fight the case for acquittal.” Kappan is just glad to be out. “I now realize the true meaning of freedom,” he told me, even though the court’s bail order confines him to Delhi for six weeks before he can return to Kerala. “I am happy to be back with family and to be able to meet with friends.”

As Kappan left jail, he told reporters that the justice he’d received was “half-baked,” that he had been framed, that nothing was found on him except his laptop and mobile phone. “I had two pens and a notebook too,” Kappan added. He was a working journalist on an assignment, he told me, and he had to spend two years in jail for just doing his job.

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“It was a philosophical question but, according to textbook science, grass isn’t really green, it’s just the light reflected from it has a certain wavelength,” Vickers says. “I thought there’d be a consensus on it.”

Instead, Vickers’ question prompted fierce semantic debate. Some colleagues argued that grass has objective properties — color being one of them. Others contended that only light exists in a physical form: what a human perceives as green is merely certain molecules reflecting electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 520 and 570 nanometers.

The open-ended, theoretical question rendered the survey data nearly worthless. Rather than general agreement, all that emerged was lively scientific and philosophical discussion across academic inboxes. But the high response rate gave Vickers encouragement: his idea for an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus could really work. All he needed was to ask a more straightforward line of inquiry.

It was while writing his book on the relationship between science and truth, Identifying Future-Proof Science, that Vickers became convinced that there should be a more accessible way to establish general academic agreement on disputed topics. “The traditional theory, even for non-experts, is to decide what to believe based on the science itself,” he explains. “But the more I wrote, the more I thought, ‘That’s not how the real world works.’ You’d never say to someone worried about getting vaccinated, ‘Here, read this textbook on the science of vaccines’ — it’s summarizing decades of research; you’re asking someone who might not have the background knowledge to read, judge and understand it.”

Help for the time-stressed non-academic, says Vickers, will come in the form of a large-scale poll of global experts responding to popular scientific issues via a set of four options, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” at the extremes, and “weakly agree” to “weakly disagree” in the center. Results will be published in academic journals, with the eventual aim of a physical institute housing vast teams of researchers, data scientists and IT experts working towards the goal of greater societal consensus on subjects like climate change and pandemics.

Vickers’ hope is to also aid academia itself: there is a lack of hard data quantifying how many experts agree on the biggest topics of the day. “It’s actually difficult to find how many global scientists believe that Covid-19 is caused by a virus,” he says. “And the best attempt to quantify the scientific community’s opinion on whether climate change is driven by human activity has 2,780 respondents: a tiny fraction of the world’s scientists you could ask, and nearly all were from Western countries.”

Driving the initiative is the fight against misinformation. Expertise has long been weaponized as means of power and deception, particularly among marginalized and minority communities, says Nicole Grove, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. In some cases, it’s created a sense of mistrust, undermining the credibility of some institutions. “It wasn’t that long ago that doctors were recommending ‘healthy’ brands of cigarettes to their patients, where seemingly scientific research was used by tobacco companies as verifiable evidence that we now know was completely manufactured.”  

Experts say that there has perhaps never been more dispute than there is today on what makes a fact, a fact. “The internet is an amazing access point for knowledge, but it’s also changed the way people are able to produce what appears to be evidence to support any point of view,” adds Grove. “One can always find someone with credentials who will take on any position at any time. My sense is misinformation is more about bombardment than a lack of information.”

Social media has also created echo chambers that fan the flames of conspiracies, even in the face of incontrovertible proof. “Research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when their psychological needs are frustrated,” says Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. “They can turn people away from mainstream politics and science in favor of more extreme political views and anti-science attitudes. And these theories seem to arise even when the scientific consensus is clear.”

Vickers acknowledges that his proposed consensus-finding institute won’t appeal to sections of the population that think the whole system is corrupt. But he believes his idea could benefit broader society, particularly on health issues. He cites a June 2022 study showing that Covid-19 vaccine uptake was significantly boosted in the Czech Republic once a skeptical public were shown that 90% of 9,650 doctors trusted in its safety. “The high consensus helped correct a misconception that only half of physicians were confident in the vaccine,” he says. “It ultimately led to higher vaccinations, meaning fewer deaths. It may sound dramatic, but the cost in a lack of consensus can be that stark.”

Beyond health crises though, there are questions over whether experts should be burdened with an altruistic role in educating the public on what they consider to be a scientific fact. “Scientists shouldn’t be loaded up with societal duties no one else has,” says James Ladyman, professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol. “The rise in misinformation is a matter for regulation and government — it has nothing to do with science.”

There are also concerns that a frictionless polling model could supersede the complex, nuanced pursuit of acquiring and discussing knowledge. “Science is a highly structured social organization in which consensus is achieved semi-formally through conferences, meetings and journal publications,” adds Ladyman. “It’s not a flat structure where people vote and everyone has equal say. When a scientific institution wants to take a position on a topic, it typically sets up a subcommittee that writes a report with details of their inquiry — it doesn’t poll all its members.”

While a hard figure may not exist, there is a consensus among the scientific community that smoking cigarettes is a leading cause of cancer and that human activity is the main driver of climate change. Determining a general agreement among more debated topics, such as whether biological sex is the main determinant of gender, may pose more of a challenge. 

“A shared commitment to telling the truth about nature, and to getting that truth out there, still leaves a lot of room for disagreement among even the most expert of scientists,” says Gregory Radick, professor of history and philosophy at the University of Leeds. “And much is lost when scientific knowledge gets boiled down to an answer to a simple ‘yes or no’ question.”

It means that facts can be disputed by experts. Ladyman says that a mass-survey model risks creating more noise in a system already blasting information round-the-clock. “In principle, finding out the scientific consensus on a topic could be good. But it presupposes that the information can’t be found out already. I find it unlikely that a significant number who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change would change their mind if they saw there was a huge scientific consensus about it — they probably wouldn’t care.”

However, Vickers believes that his Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus needs to happen, especially if it can help people make better informed health decisions. “In the 20th century, it was too easy for the tobacco industry to make it look like there were two sides to the story — a global poll would have shown there were perhaps only 2% of rogue scientists that existed,” he says. “The goal isn’t to tell the public the facts — it’s to accurately measure the opinion of the scientific community and then provide people with data that could be useful to them.”

Vickers’ epistemic agency is still in the funding stages. His team is currently debating who qualifies as a scientist, from the obvious choice of an academic affiliated to a relevant science department or institute, to the borderline cases of a former nurse now giving health lectures at universities. 

Then, there’s dividing the scientists up: a meteorologist and, say, a pediatrician may receive an equal vote on a climate change question; the consensus among each scientific discipline, however, could be shown separately. Finally, there’s the issue of ensuring a high enough response rate for strong enough data — the plan is for a personalized email to be sent within institutions, just like in the original question to Durham scientists, to get as many survey queries answered.

Consensus for an institute determining scientific consensus is, ironically, difficult. The next step is a pilot program in April, involving 18,000 scientists from 31 institutions across 12 different countries. The planned opening question should, at least, elicit strong assent: “Has science proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is caused by a virus?” “It’s not a particularly interesting question as most people accept that it’s been established, but we want to set a baseline for what solid scientific consensus looks like,” says Vickers. 

In an age where a rabbit hole of misinformation is only ever a few clicks away, Vickers’ hope is his idea will reach well-meaning people left confused by the online maelstrom. “Had a mass survey of global scientists existed when the pandemic began — questions on how Covid is transmitted, mask efficacy, vaccine safety — I think it would have helped the public,” he says. “There’s a mess of information out there.”

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Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren't saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

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