17 January 22
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17 January 22
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The next attempted coup will not be a mob attack, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one. Instead of costumed rioters, the insurrectionists are men in suits and ties
The first has been seared into the national psyche: costumed insurrectionists ransacking the US Capitol, attacking Capitol police, and interrupting the constitutionally mandated electoral college count. They got closer than anyone could imagine to Vice-President Mike Pence and other terrified leaders, some hidden behind makeshift office-furniture barricades.
Then, with the marble corridors still stained with blood, 147 elected Republicans maneuvered across broken glass only to vote with the insurrectionists. Around 11pm, a majority of House Republicans voted to reject free and fair election results from Arizona; two hours later, as a weary nation slept, a similar number refused to accept results from Pennsylvania.
One year later, it’s the second band of insurrectionists, the ones wearing suits and ties, that pose the most serious threat. The next attempted coup will not be a violent overthrow of the Capitol, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one, subverting election machinery and exploiting various constitutional loopholes. It is well under way. Its plotters have learned important lessons from last year’s rushed and often-buffoonish dress rehearsal. New laws have been passed by state legislatures under the pretext of halting “election fraud” that will instead abet the next big lie. It’s frighteningly imaginable to see how it succeeds.
These are the steps that Republicans are undertaking, now, to create a different outcome next time.
1. Gerrymandering swing-state legislatures. It all begins here. Any effort to change election laws or to argue that legislatures have the power to appoint electors themselves requires Republican control of battleground state legislatures.
2. Restricting access to the polls. In 2021, 19 states enacted 34 laws making it more difficult to cast a ballot. They included 2020’s fiercest battlegrounds, Arizona (decided in 2020 by just 10,457 votes) and Georgia.
3. Capturing electoral administration. Republican legislatures in eight states, sometimes overriding the vetoes of Democratic governors, have claimed partisan control of crucial electoral responsibilities or shifted them away from elected secretaries of state. Georgia Republicans censured Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who refused to be cowed by Trump’s attacks on the electoral process, then removed him as chair of the state election board – and seized that power for the legislature itself. Another law gives this board the power to claim control of the vote-counting process in individual counties, such as heavily Democratic Fulton county, home to Atlanta. Arizona barred its secretary of state from representing the state in litigation defending its election code – that is, until 2 January 2023, when the Democrat who currently holds the position leaves office. Texas now requires the governor, lieutenant governor and the house speaker each to sign off on any grants over $1,000 to local election boards, grants having been a popular method of expanding voting access in cities and rural areas in 2020 when states cited financial reasons for shuttering precincts.
4. Pressuring – and criminalizing – the work of election officials. Many new state laws don’t simply make it harder for citizens to vote, they make it tougher for non-partisan election workers to do their jobs. Georgia, Texas and Florida have created civil penalties and fines of up to $25,000 for minor, technical infractions – for the kind of help non-partisan officials offer when needed, or obstructing the view of partisan poll workers – and even opened them to criminal prosecution.
According to a Brennan Center and Bipartisan Policy Center study, a third of election workers report feeling unsafe in their jobs. As many as 25% say the toxic, bullying climate could cause them to leave their jobs. Their replacements, in positions that had once been non-partisan, non-competitive and volunteer? The big lie’s truest believers, seeking the offices some believe stole the 2020 election from them. This is a “five-alarm fire”, the Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, told the New York Times.
5. Targeting key elections in 2022. The only thing that has prevented Florida/Georgia/Texas-style omnibus voting restrictions in deeply gerrymandered Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are Democratic governors with veto power. Should Republicans claim those offices in 2022, anything is possible. Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have previously proposed allocating electoral college by congressional district rather than statewide, which would exacerbate the impact of partisan gerrymanders and probably benefit Republicans in otherwise Democratic-leaning states. Under the Wisconsin proposal, Trump would have won eight of 10 electors even though Biden received more votes.
Trump has endorsed a former Fox anchor as the next governor of Arizona who he said “will fight to restore Election integrity (both past and future!)”. The two leading Republican candidates for Arizona’s secretary of state, meanwhile, are two state representatives, one of whom attended the 6 January Capitol riot. The other sponsored a bill that would have allowed the legislature to reject the certification of electors, potentially overturning free and fair results.
Nationwide, of the top 15 candidates for secretary of state in five crucial battleground states, 10 question the results of the 2020 race.
6. Convincing the base. According to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, two-thirds of Republicans believe that “voter fraud helped Biden win the 2020 election”. In a new University of Massachusetts poll, 71% of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president. A third of Trump voters told NPR they believe the conspiracy theory that the 6 January attack was a false-flag operation by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents”.
Trump couldn’t overturn the 2020 results, but he achieved something perhaps nearly as damaging: The “big lie” not only took hold, but it has become sacred to large majorities of angry Republicans convinced that Trump was cheated out of a second term. If this same fealty to phony fraud claims drives Republican elected officials in Congress and state legislatures in 2024, it’s disturbingly easy to imagine competing sets of electors emerging from states won by a Democratic candidate but controlled by a Republican legislature, forcing a constitutional showdown and testing the powers of state legislatures over electors.
7. Ensuring that the courts won’t save us. Beware the Independent State Legislatures doctrine (ISL). Once a stealth effort in Federalist Society legal circles, this extreme reading of the US constitution has as many as four supporters on a US supreme court packed with conservatives. It argues that the constitution gives state legislatures the sole authority to set all election rules – including the assigning of electoral college votes – independently, and immune from judicial review. Taken to its furthest edge, it effectively concludes that there can be no possible checks and balances on state legislatures’ authority when it comes to election law. It might sound bonkers. But in February last year, when the US supreme court dismissed as moot a challenge to Pennsylvania’s absentee ballot extension, three justices dissented and cited the ISL.
If 2020 repeats itself in 2024 – a Democratic candidate with a 7 million-vote edge in the popular vote, the same slender margins in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, and embittered Republicans controlling gerrymandered legislatures – it’s hard to imagine the system holding quite the way it did, just barely, a year ago.
Of course, Republicans could always win the 2024 election outright. But make no mistake: with preparations like this, they’re ready either way. They have almost three years to perfect this playbook. Those of us who believe in American democracy have much less time left to prevent it – and a much more complicated road.
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin waves to the crowd during an inaugural celebration on Saturday. (photo: Steve Helber/AP)
Newly elected Republican unveils sweeping conservative orders, including loosening public health mandates during the pandemic
Glenn Youngkin, a former private equity CEO who has never served in public office before, became the state’s first Republican governor since 2010 after a closely watched gubernatorial election last year.
The 55 year-old placed the issue of critical race theory (CRT) at the centre of his campaign, capitalizing on a conservative backlash against the discipline and pledging to ban teaching of it in Virginia’s schools. Critical race theory is an academic practice that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.
On Saturday, after taking the oath of office, Youngkin unveiled a list of nine executive orders and two executive directives, with the first on the list described as a directive to “restore excellence in education by ending the use of divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, in public education”.
The order lists 13 instructions, many directed to the state’s school superintendent, who has been tasked with reviewing the state’s curriculum and policies within the department of education, to identify “inherently divisive concepts”. The order also bans an executive employee from “directing or otherwise compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to inherently divisive concepts”.
The order does not define “divisive concepts” but cites critical race theory as an example.
At least 22 other states have moved towards imposing limits on the teaching of critical race theory in recent months, as rightwing media in the US continues to fuel disinformation about the teaching of the previously little-known discipline.
Despite the sweeping and ambiguous language, the governor’s power to intervene in local school districts is limited. And although Virginia’s general assembly has the power to compel school boards to adopt specific policy via legislation, state Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate, meaning new laws are unlikely.
On Saturday, senior state Democrats told local media they planned to block much of the new governor’s agenda.
The sweeping executive orders also included loosening of public health mandates, aimed at slowing the spread of Covid-19 during the coronavirus pandemic. Youngkin’s second order eliminated mask ordinances for pupils in the state’s schools, while his last executive directive abolished vaccine mandates for state employees.
Like many other areas of the US, Virginia continues to see a surge in Covid cases as the omicron variant rips through the country. Cases are up 288% in comparison to last winter’s surge, according to the New York Times. The current seven day positivity rate sits at over 35%, according to the state health department.
15,803 have died in the state from the virus since the pandemic began.
Mitch McConnell, voting-rights flip-flopper. (photo: Kent Nishimura/LA Times/Getty Images)
While the Democrats’ inability to enact filibuster reform understandably draws a lot of attention, the more fundamental reason for Congress’s inability to enact voting-rights protections is the Republican Party’s lockstep opposition to any new legislation on the matter. It’s no surprise that the GOP rejected the wide-ranging provisions of the For the People Act, which gets into issues like public financing and gerrymandering reform. But another bill Democrats are trying to enact, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, really just restores elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that most Republicans used to support routinely.
The leading Republican arguments against this legislation have been neatly summed up by Mitch McConnell. The Senate minority leader has expressed outrage over the idea that the Voting Rights Act enforcement mechanisms struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 might be restored — though he had voted twice (in 1986 and 2006) to extend the 1965 law with those provisions intact.
In a speech on the Senate floor last June, McConnell described the relatively modest John Lewis bill as some sort of radical power grab by Democrats. “What they are trying to do directly with H.R. 1 [the more sweeping For the People bill] they would try to achieve indirectly through this rewrite of the Voting Rights Act.”
The John Lewis bill is actually only a “rewrite” of Sections 4 and 5 of the 1965 law. Section 4 laid out a formula for identifying jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting; Section 5 required pre-clearance by the U.S. Justice Department for election- and voting-law changes in states, cities, or counties that met the criteria. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court deemed Section 4 unconstitutional in its current language, effectively neutering Section 5 as well.
Technically, McConnell was correct when he asserted on the Senate floor that “the Supreme Court did not strike down the Voting Rights Act; it’s still the law.” But by striking down Section 4, the Court robbed the law of its power by removing its central enforcement mechanism.
Later in his speech, McConnell claimed, incorrectly, that the Supreme Court had “concluded that the conditions that existed in 1965 no longer existed. So there is no threat to the voting-rights law. It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already. And so I think [new legislation] is unnecessary.” This suggestion that racial bias in voting practices is a thing of the past is in line with extensive public-opinion research showing that rank-and-file Republicans now believe that discrimination against white Americans is as prevalent — or perhaps even more prevalent — than racism against nonwhite Americans.
But what the Court actually held, in its 5-4 decision, is that the Section 4 formula based on 1965 data was outdated; the majority did not declare that racial discrimination in voting and election laws no longer exists. This is a crucial distinction. The Court basically invited Congress to update the formula if it chose to do so, and that’s precisely what the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is intended to do. Refusing to do so is the power grab.
When asked, at a press conference later in June, why Republicans were blocking a voting-rights bill from being debated, McConnell answered, “This is not a federal issue. It oughta be left to the states. There’s nothing broken around the country.” So the GOP leader has also explicitly embraced the states’ rights argument that defenders of discrimination used against the original Voting Rights Act.
We’ve come a long way since 30 of 31 Republican senators voted for the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and since every Senate Republican voted for its extension in 2006. And it’s not just support for or opposition to legislation that has changed: The state-sovereignty claims and dismissals of racism advanced by Jim Crow Democrats fighting civil-rights and voting-rights legislation in the 1960s have now become orthodoxy for the party of Abraham Lincoln.
Katie Lucey administers a COVID-19 test to her son Maguire on December 16 in New York. (photo: AP)
COVID’s winter surge holds a deeper lesson about the perils of interpreting data without a full appreciation of the context.
The Sharpshooter Fallacy is often used by scientists to illustrate our tendency to narrativize data after the fact. We may observe an unusual grouping of cancer cases and back into an explanation for it, cherry-picking statistics and ignoring the vagaries of chance. As we muddle through COVID-19’s winter surge, the story holds a deeper lesson about the perils of interpreting data without a full appreciation of the context. Omicron, because of its extraordinary contagiousness and its relative mildness, has transformed the risks and the consequences of infection, but not our reading of the statistics that have been guiding us through the pandemic. Do the numbers still mean what we think they mean?
A coronavirus infection isn’t what it once was. Studies suggest that, compared with Delta, Omicron is a third to half as likely to send someone to the hospital; by some estimates, the chance that an older, vaccinated person will die of COVID is now lower than the risk posed by the seasonal flu. And yet the variant is exacting a punishing toll—medical, social, economic. (Omicron still presents a major threat to people who are unvaccinated.) The United States is recording, on average, more than eight hundred thousand coronavirus cases a day, three times last winter’s peak. Given the growing use of at-home tests, this official count greatly underestimates the true number of infections. We don’t know how many rapid tests are used each day, or what proportion return positive, rendering unreliable traditional metrics, such as a community’s test-positivity rate, which is used to guide policy on everything from school closures to sporting events.
There are many other numbers we’d like to know. How likely is Omicron to deliver not an irritating cold but the worst flu of your life? How does that risk increase with the number and severity of medical conditions a person has? What are the chances of lingering symptoms following a mild illness? How long does immunity last after a booster shot or an infection? Americans aren’t waiting to find out. Last week, rates of social distancing and self-quarantining rose to their highest levels in nearly a year, and dining, shopping, and social gatherings fell to new lows. Half of Americans believe that it will be at least a year before they return to their pre-pandemic lives, if they ever do; three-quarters feel that they’re as likely, or more so, to contract the virus today—a year after vaccines became available—as they were when the pandemic began.
Should we be focussed on case counts at all? Some experts, including Anthony Fauci, argue that hospitalizations are now the more relevant marker of viral damage. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Americans are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus—a higher number than at any other point in the pandemic. But that figure, too, is not quite what it seems. Many hospitalized COVID patients have no respiratory symptoms; they were admitted for other reasons—a heart attack, a broken hip, cancer surgery—and happened to test positive for the virus. There are no nationwide estimates of the proportion of hospitalized patients with “incidental COVID,” but in New York State some forty per cent of hospitalized patients with COVID are thought to have been admitted for other reasons. The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services reported that incidental infections accounted for roughly two-thirds of COVID admissions at its hospitals. (Pediatric COVID hospitalizations have also reached record levels, probably because Omicron’s transmissibility means that many more kids are contracting the virus; there’s little evidence that the variant is causing more severe illness in them, though.)
Clarifying the distinction between a virus that drives illness and one that’s simply along for the ride is more than an academic exercise. If we tally asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections as COVID hospitalizations, we risk exaggerating the toll of the virus, with all the attendant social and economic ramifications. If we overstate the degree of incidental COVID, we risk promoting a misguided sense of security. Currently, the U.S. has no data-collection practices or unified framework for separating one type of hospitalization from another. Complicating all this is the fact that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish a person hospitalized “with COVID” from one hospitalized “for COVID.” For some patients, a coronavirus infection can aggravate a seemingly unrelated condition—a COVID fever tips an elderly woman with a urinary-tract infection into delirium; a bout of diarrhea dehydrates a man admitted with sickle-cell disease. In such cases, COVID isn’t an innocent bystander, nor does it start the fire—it adds just enough tinder to push a manageable problem into a crisis.
It is a positive development that we’re able to engage in this discussion at all. With Alpha and Delta, almost all COVID hospitalizations were related to the infection. The situation is different with Omicron—a function both of its diminished ability to replicate in the lungs and of its superior capacity to infect people who’ve been vaccinated or previously contracted the virus. Still, parsing the numbers in a moment of crisis can seem a subordinate aim. Omicron is imposing an undeniable strain on the health-care system. Last week, a quarter of U.S. hospitals reported critical staffing shortages. Many have postponed non-urgent surgeries, and some have asked their employees to continue working even after they’ve been infected. Some states have called in the National Guard; others have enacted “crisis standards of care,” whereby overwhelmed hospitals can restrict or deny treatment to some patients—I.C.U. beds, ventilators, and other lifesaving resources—in order to prioritize those who are more likely to benefit.
But this wave, too, shall pass—possibly soon. At the end of it, the vast majority of Americans could have some degree of immunity, resulting from vaccination, infection, or both. In all probability, we’d then approach the endemic phase of the virus, and be left with a complex set of questions about how to live with it. What level of disease are we willing to accept? What is the purpose of further restrictions? What do we owe one another? A clear-eyed view of the numbers will inform the answers. But it’s up to us to paint the targets.
People celebrate the first anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2015. The annexation, which happened after the Ukrainian revolution, has been widely condemned and ushered the Ukrainian conflict. (photo: Alexander Aksakov/Getty Images)
As autocrats' tactics get more creative, protecting the nation isn't just the job of governments anymore.
Though it’s not yet clear who was behind the attack, the timing made many observers think immediately of Russia, which has a long history of targeting Ukraine with cyber aggression. As the EU’s chief diplomat put it, “ I can't blame anybody as I have no proof, but we can imagine.”
Regardless of the perpetrator, the incident was a reminder of the many tools Russian President Vladimir Putin has used to weaken Ukraine other than traditional warfare. There is, of course, an actual war being fought in the country’s east. But Russia has supplemented its military efforts with nonmilitary tactics such as cyberattacks, disinformation and propaganda meant to exacerbate political tensions and undermine Ukrainians’ faith in their government and in democracy itself.
Much of Putin’s playbook falls into this murky area between war and peace — what national security analysts have come to call the gray zone. The term has become fashionable, but the concept isn’t new. It describes tactics that fall short of outright military aggression and instead take aim at a country’s social, economic or political cohesion. Gray-zone tactics include disinformation and cyberwarfare, as well as subversive economic practices, like China’s efforts to coerce Western firms into doing its bidding. Another recent example came when Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko — a Putin-allied autocrat — manufactured a migrant crisis at the border between Belarus and Poland. This also wasn’t a traditional act of aggression, but it created a feeling of crisis and chaos, forcing Poland and the rest of Europe to prepare for possible conflict.
Though the term can feel overused in national security circles, calling these seemingly disparate practices “gray-zone tactics” helps us see what they have in common: They’re cheaper and easier than using military force, they frequently aren’t overtly illegal, and to date they’ve rarely caused loss of life. Finally, gray-zone tactics take advantage of freedoms in democratic societies — like the open Internet, a permissive business climate and freedom of migration — to create political divisions, economic disruption or general social turmoil. Autocratic regimes (as well as criminals who are sometimes linked to them) are undermining liberal democracies by weaponizing their own strengths against them.
This emerging form of not-quite-warfare poses a direct challenge to President Joe Biden’s goal of advancing democracy over authoritarianism. It’s part of what I call the “Defender’s Dilemma”: Liberal democracies are inherently vulnerable to gray-zone threats, but have worked themselves into such a sorry mess of divisiveness that they’re practically begging hostile countries and sundry groups to exploit their weakness. Over time, such tactics may help convince people that democracy isn’t the best form of governance — a task that could be disturbingly easy with many in liberal democracies already feeling that the system doesn’t work.
There is no obvious tool or institution with which to combat gray-zone tactics. It’s been clear for decades that the armed forces need help from other parts of government to combat threats that are diplomatic, technological, economic or scientific in nature. Today, even that isn’t enough. As authoritarians eye a wider, more creative variety of targets — from private companies’ supply chains, to the systems that deliver gas and water, to faith in democracy itself — no government can, on its own, protect its population from gray-zone aggression.
The tool governments need is one that won’t be easy to deploy: the rest of society. Companies and private citizens increasingly need to play a role in protecting democracy by shoring up their digital security, learning to detect misinformation and not succumbing to their worst instincts when cyberattacks or disinformation crises attempt to foment widespread panic.
Can society really come together this way? Obviously, this seems like a tall order at a time when so few Americans trust their institutions — or one another. But other countries are experimenting with making corporations and citizens an asset in the fight against this new category of threats. Their experiences offer a starting point for the United States, which has only recently discovered that it’s vulnerable in a way never was before.
If it turns out that Russia or Russian-linked hackers were behind Friday’s cyberattack in Ukraine, part of their rationale will surely have been to worsen the country’s existing political divides and make Ukrainians conclude that their government is failing. (Later on Friday, reports suggested that the U.S. believes Russian operatives are planning “acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy-forces” to create a pretext to invade Ukraine — an example of how shadowy “almost-war” tactics can quickly lead to real war.)
Similarly, Lukashenko knew that massing migrants at Poland’s border would stoke existing divisions over European refugee policy and multiculturalism. The situation resembles a form of gray-zone warfare with which Americans are more familiar: In 2016, Russian intelligence agencies’ sought to manipulate Americans’ political views through Facebook. This effort took advantage of the open political debate in a free society, using that openness to turn us against each other.
Gray-zone warfare also exploits the interconnectedness of global business and the growing role private companies play in shaping public life. Danish, Irish and Romanian companies leased planes to the airlines transporting the migrants to Belarus. Russia’s most aggressive act of cyberwarfare against Ukraine — the NotPetya attack — brought down multinational corporations around the world by exploiting Ukraine’s links with the global digital economy. And of course, Russian election meddling in the 2016 U.S. election was that much harder to verify and address because it was done through a privately owned social-media platform.
America’s adversaries have realized that targeting private companies or individuals is a fruitful way to hamper society’s day-to-day functioning and spread chaos. Ransomware attacks can hit gas pipelines, the power grid or critical parts of the supply chain that are often run by private companies. Beyond some minimal standard precautions, private firms in the U.S. and other democracies have significant latitude when it comes to cybersecurity. That makes them vulnerable. Yes, companies operating critical national infrastructure are regulated by the government — but even in those sectors, the balance between societal responsibility and responsibility to shareholders is far from settled.
Another emerging form of geopolitical coercion short of war involves direct pressure on companies as a way of influencing their home governments. Nike and H&M were caught unprepared when they were hit by a Chinese boycott last spring, an apparent act of revenge for Western sanctions over Uyghur forced labor. Last year the telecom company Ericsson became another easy proxy target as China sought to force Sweden to reverse its decision to exclude Huawei from its 5G network. Again, these practices tend to be more successful in free and open societies because they have more open business climates.
Of course, non-military aggression against society at large is not new. In wartime, propaganda is a constant companion of military action, and blockades are used to try and starve a population into submission. During the Cold War, both sides used broadcast news and publications to fight the battle of ideas.
But today’s globalized, digitized world offers far more opportunities to achieve geopolitical aims by targeting a country’s businesses and citizens. Practitioners of gray-zone tactics will find more and more ways to use the interconnectedness and openness of democracies to undermine them. And because aggressors frequently use tactics are much less acceptable in liberal democracies, the defender tends to always be one step behind.
The private sector and ordinary citizens are generally asked to obey laws and pay taxes, but most people don’t think of them as playing a central role in protecting the nation’s security or its democracy. But this will need to change as it becomes easier and more effective to target a country’s economic engine or social cohesion — in ways that government isn’t equipped to handle alone. In case of a severe cyber attack against, say, a major food retailer, the government can respond by helping identify the attacker and even retaliating. But the company should play an active role, too, by having a backup plan in place to make sure it can keep distributing after being compromised and communicate effectively with the government about what’s happening. (It should also maintain high cybersecurity standards in the first place.) Consumers, meanwhile, surely have an obligation not to panic and start hoarding goods.
A number of European countries are already taking steps toward a “whole-of-society” approach that acknowledges the role of private citizens and the private sector in keeping countries safe. Three years ago, Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency — an agency similar to FEMA, but with a mandate to educate the public and coordinate crisis response — sent a leaflet to every household with information about how to spot disinformation and what to do if power or gasoline runs out. Just this month, Sweden launched a government agency for psychological defense, which will counter disinformation and make the population more resilient to it. Last year, Britain explicitly announced it was shifting to a whole-of-society approach to national security. Among its first steps: plans to launch a civil reserve, analogous to military reserves, of experts in fields from cyber to healthcare who will volunteer their services in crises.
In 2020 Latvia published a crisis-preparedness leaflet called “72 Hours: What to do in case of crisis.” The idea, the country’s defense minister wrote at the time, is to “[prepare] society for catastrophes we cannot specifically predict.” The document instructs citizens on what to do for food, water and health care in the event of a natural disaster, war or other crisis. The Czech Republic launched joint military-industry gray-zone exercises, in which the armed forces and companies from every sector team up to practice reacting to different forms of aggression below the threshold of war, from cyber attacks to supply chain disruptions to coercion of companies.
France, meanwhile, has launched a one-month national service program in which teenagers learn crisis response skills; the program is also designed to enhance cohesion among different societal groups. Similarly, Your Year for Germany invites young Germans to spend a year training and practicing homeland-security protection.
The question is, are any of these efforts going to work? It’s too early to say whether they have a real shot at succeeding. And Americans should be skeptical about whether smaller-scale initiatives in Europe’s less populous, more cohesive countries can make a difference in the larger and generally more fractious United States.
Still, it’s relatively early in the game. At this stage, it’s progress to acknowledge the unique nature of this problem — and to try something. The whole-of-society approach is essentially psychological, focused on building confidence and preparedness to deal with anything from an attack on the electric grid to a misinformation crisis about migrants at the border. It’s an unusual philosophy, particularly for the United States. But the growing prevalence of gray-zone aggression preying on a divided populace and a complacent private sector should be a wake-up call.
There is some movement in the United States toward preparing companies for a hostile nation cutting off essential services or attacking election infrastructure. The Department of Energy holds regular meetings with leading energy companies to discuss threats to their operations. Key businesses have recently been obliged to better protect their networks, and a May executive order by Biden makes firms part of a broader effort to secure the cybersecurity supply chain. The exercise Jack Voltaic, coordinated by the U.S. Army’s Cyber Institute, is a good example of cooperation between the military and companies.
These are promising signs. The U.S. government needs to more regularly engage with companies and executives to update them on threats they may not know about. Companies will also need to start taking action sector-wide, such as by sharing cyber incident details with one another. Commercial satellite operators already do this, but few other industries do, generally fearing their competitors will use the information for advantage. But as cyberattacks and coercion efforts become more common, companies may need to set those worries aside. For instance, Colonial Pipeline and JBS both paid their ransomware attackers out of self-interest. Going forward, businesses could team up within their sectors and publicly say they’ll never pay ransoms to create a stronger norm before the next attack.
Tougher than getting private firms to collaborate with one another and the government will be securing buy-in from the population at large. Citizens of liberal democracies aren’t used to being asked to play an explicit role in protecting society, especially when it involves time or inconvenience. Then again, because the convenience they prize is so vulnerable to new forms of aggression, it’s in their interest to help make society as resilient as possible.
Citizen involvement — both individual and collective — won’t be easy to organize. Two decades ago, Robert Putnam’s seminal Bowling Alone documented the decline of civic engagement in America. Now, we can draw a straight line from that disengagement to the divisions that plague America today and that seem to positively paralyze it in the face of crises. Adversaries have already taken advantage of this weakness, and we should expect that pattern to worsen. The fragmentation and atomization of society documented by Putnam is alarming on its own, but when it invites aggression from hostile countries, addressing it becomes a matter of urgency.
This September the House passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, intended help the country address gray-zone aggression. The amendment instructs the government to establish how to conduct gray-zone campaigns, including prioritizing the allied nations that are frequently targeted. This is good progress, but what we need next will be more specific efforts to enlist not just the government but also the American people to make society resilient against economic, psychological and other attacks below the threshold of war.
Perhaps in the future, we’ll see programs in which retired American doctors and nurses join civilian reserve forces for crises like fuel chaos triggered by cyber attacks or even epidemics instigated by hostile states. Or, initiatives like Finland’s elementary-school information literacy instruction could help gradually inoculate Americans against the pandemic of disinformation — a problem that phenomenal amounts of research have tried to tackle, but that remains a stubborn contributor to the divisions that make us vulnerable. Or, we might envision more formal, Czech-style collaboration between companies and the Pentagon to game out scenarios for future ransomware attacks on critical utilities.
With the whole of society involved, America would be a lot stronger when the next crisis strikes. The challenge is to create a mindset where companies and citizens don’t fall into passivity or destructive behavior when a crisis occurs. This is certainly a massive undertaking — and we don’t have much indication right now that it can work, especially in a divided democracy like the United States. But this country, along with many others around the world, is slowly becoming aware of the challenge.
Many homeowners put signs in their front yards informing prospective burglars that the house is equipped with a burglar alarm (or a biting dog). Standing militaries send the same message to would-be invaders. But when it comes to gray-zone aggression, countries practically put a welcome sign on their front doors. Many companies seem uninterested in playing a broader social role. And when something goes wrong, citizens sort into their tribes and are frequently unable to tell facts from falsehoods. Countries wishing to do harm would be foolish not to exploit such weakness — indeed, they already are.
In the long term, recognition of the need to act collectively against gray-zone aggression might even help serve as a force for unity. Americans may not want to bowl together again, but how about working together to keep themselves, their families, their companies’ production and sales and the country safe? Call me optimistic, but perhaps defending against this new category of threats could one day play the role of yesterday’s bowling leagues in bringing a divided people together.
Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly in the early stages of negotiating a plea deal related to the corruptions charges he faces. (photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images)
The former prime minister is facing three separate corruption cases that involve media moguls and wealthy supporters. The charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust stem from allegations including trading favors to media groups in exchange for positive press coverage.
The talks are going on behind closed doors with Israel's attorney general.
A person involved in the negotiations told NPR a deal would have Netanyahu admit to breach of trust, not bribery, and avoid prison. But disagreement remains over whether the final deal would necessitate Netanyahu leaving politics for seven years, at the end of which he would be nearly 80 years old.
Netanyahu remains a member of Israel's parliament, the Knesset.
An Israeli justice official confirmed to NPR that the negotiations are happening and are in the early stages. Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the talks.
The charges have significantly weakened Netanyahu politically. His loss of support led the country's parliament to oust him last June — putting an end to his 12-year run as the top politician.
The corruption trial has been going on for months with witnesses being called to the stand, so the news of a potential plea bargain is coming as somewhat of a surprise.
Netanyahu is still fighting the allegations against him
Netanyahu has called the charges against him trumped up and alleges there is a left-wing witch hunt against him, including in the justice system.
"They speak in high words about democracy. But what is done here again and again is an attempt to trample democracy. They are trying to cancel the will of the voters by fabricating charges," Netanyahu said in April.
Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is set to retire at the end of January. With with no permanent successor yet determined, it's unclear if a new attorney general would offer the same deal if Netanyahu does not accept it within the next two weeks.
Mandelblit could see a plea bargain as favorable to end Netanyahu's attacks on the justice system.
The deal could lead to a leadership race in Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party or even collapse Israel's government.
The current government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is a diverse coalition that came together to push Netanyahu from office. A collapse could lead to a grab of power by right-wing parties.
White City Beach at the edge of Keweenaw Bay in Lake Superior. (photo: Shantal Riley/WP)
Indigenous tribes around the lake depend on fishing to survive — but the fish are contaminated
The wild rice is sacred to the Ojibwe, also called Chippewa. “We were from the East Coast, originally,” she told me. “There was a prophecy that said there would be a light-skinned race that would come across the great salt water. In their coming, they would bring destruction upon us. In order to maintain our way of life, to maintain who we were as a people, we would have to move to the West.” There would be signs along the way: “We would know when we arrived at our final stopping place when we saw food that grew on top of the water,” Leoso said. “That was our manoomin. … ‘Mino’ in our language is good, and ‘min’ is seed. So, ‘good seed.’ ”
The rice grows on the Kakagon-Bad River Sloughs, which sit atop 16,000 acres of wetlands on the southern rim of Lake Superior. The area serves as a spawning ground for lake sturgeon, walleye, yellow perch and northern pike. Both fish and wild rice are staple foods of the Anishinaabe, as the Ojibwe call themselves.
Early last year, the state of Wisconsin issued a fish consumption advisory that recommended eating no more than one meal a month of Lake Superior rainbow smelt, caught by tribes and local anglers during smelt runs in the spring. It was the first advisory for any of the Great Lakes warning of fish with elevated levels of PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of man-made chemicals linked to cancer that have shown up in drinking water systems around the country.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment. After years of industrial use, the federal government recently took steps to regulate them. But will it be enough to assure the safety of the Indigenous people who have fished on the lake for thousands of years — and depend on the fish for survival?
A few days earlier, I was in a small plane flying over the deep green forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The plane shook violently from turbulence as it approached Keweenaw Bay, a V-shaped inlet on the southern shore of the lake. A thin layer of smoke had settled on the water, blown in from wildfires burning hundreds of miles away in Canada.
The lake tribes live in close-knit communities that I knew I’d need help to access. So, I retained a local, Charlie Rasmussen, to advise me on various aspects of the trip: He warned me about spotty cellphone coverage, which roads were under construction and where deer liked to dart out in front of traffic; he also gave me leads on locals I could speak to about fishing. (He is a writer, photographer and communications officer for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, a nonprofit that supports member tribes through natural resources management, conservation and public information. But his work with me was in a freelance capacity.)
A rental car secured, I drove an hour south along Highway 41, to the L’Anse Reservation, where a pocket of woods was quiet but for water spilling over a mossy rock ledge. Jerry Jondreau was trying to catch brook trout on Silver River, which twists its way through the reservation. The reservation is home to the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC), one of about a dozen bands, including the Bad River Band, who live around the lake.
The lake itself is often hailed for being the cleanest of the Great Lakes. But Jondreau said its pristine reputation is a misconception. “I can’t bring fish back to the family from the lake,” he explained. “We don’t eat as much fish as we used to.”
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area, spanning a vast 31,700 square miles. Surrounded by dense forests and relatively sparse populations, more than 80 species of fish live in its cold, remote waters. While the fish are abundant, they’re rife with contaminants: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, the pesticide toxaphene — all linked to cancer — and mercury, left behind as a legacy of mining in a rugged region known as Copper Country. There are enough pollutants now circulating in the great lake that Michigan lists more than a dozen consumption advisories for its fish, and the pollution runs headlong into areas where tribes practice subsistence fishing.
On a windy August afternoon, the choppy waters around Lake Superior’s Madeline Island glittered with flecks of sunshine. Boats headed north, fishing poles straining toward wakes churning behind them. In 2019, Wisconsin scientists took samples from fish swimming near the island, considered the spiritual homeland of the Ojibwe. Six fish species had detectable levels of PFAS — and rainbow smelt had an average of seven times the amount of PFAS that were found in the other fish, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. It was enough to trigger the January 2021 consumption advisory for Wisconsin waters. Two months later, Minnesota and Michigan followed suit with their own advisories.
PFAS were introduced to Americans in the 1940s. Prized for their resistance to heat, oil and water, they were key ingredients in products like Scotchgard and Teflon. Today, they’re found in food packaging, carpets, furniture, clothing, makeup and everyday household items like dental floss. They’re used on an industrial scale in nonstick and waterproof coatings, electronics, degreasers and fire foams. The chemicals have been linked to a host of serious health problems: high cholesterol, liver damage, suppression of the immune system, thyroid disease, kidney and testicular cancer, among others, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some take years to be eliminated from the human body.
“They dissolve easily in water,” says environmental engineer Christy Remucal, who studies PFAS in her lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Remucal was not involved in the testing of the Lake Superior fish.) So, the chemicals move around the environment fairly easily, she told me — and there are thousands of them. One of these, called PFOS, or perfluorooctane sulfonic acid — found at airports and military sites with histories of fire foam use — tends to build up in fish.
But Michigan scientists were puzzled when the little smelt showed higher levels of PFOS than larger, predator fish such as lake trout. “Typically, the higher up on a food chain that you go, you’re going to have higher levels of contamination,” explains Brandon Armstrong, an aquatic biologist with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), referring to a process called biomagnification. “It was surprising to see such a high level of PFOS in smelt because they feed low on the food chain,” he says. “They’re eating small fish and zooplankton out in the glades. They’re not a top-predator species.”
Smelt is just one among many fish that tribal communities in the lake basin depend on. Indeed, food sovereignty was a cornerstone of 19th-century treaties in which the Ojibwe ceded millions of acres and retained their rights to fish, hunt and gather. These rights were challenged a century later, when William Jondreau, an Ojibwe man — and grandfather of Jerry Jondreau — was arrested for catching lake trout when it was out of season. He claimed, under treaty rights, that he was free to fish on Keweenaw Bay, where his people had fished for centuries. His case went before the Michigan Supreme Court and, in the 1971 landmark Jondreau decision, the court ruled that the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa superseded state fish and game laws.
The decision reaffirmed his people’s right to hunt and fish on ceded territories. But there has been a steady “devaluation” of treaty rights since, Jerry Jondreau argues. “In those agreements, we retained our rights to hunt, fish and gather,” he says. “In exchange, the U.S. got all the land. It’s accruing wealth. But the fish, the water … those things are becoming sick.”
On the Bad River Reservation, a flash of lightning lit up a dark cloud over the Kakagon River. Seconds later, a low rumble of thunder rolled through the wetlands. Edith Leoso watched from the back of the boat as it sped inland. The rice harvest would be plentiful this season, she said. But the smelt population is in decline — and has been for years. Even so, she said, “people are still smelting when they shouldn’t be. We should leave that fish alone.” They’re fishing out of necessity, she explained, regardless of consumption advisories: “We don’t recognize them if we have to feed our families. That’s the bottom line.”
Michigan also lists consumption guidelines for fish in hundreds of smaller lakes and rivers. “Fishing is a primary source of subsistence for Ojibwe tribes throughout the basin,” says Valoree Gagnon, director of university-Indigenous community partnerships at the Great Lakes Research Center of Michigan Technological University. “So, when you’re asked to lower fish consumption, you’re not just losing meals, you’re losing all those practices associated with fishing: sharing knowledge and passing that to future generations. It changes all kinds of social dynamics.”
The lake tribes have been proactive in response to environmental threats to their water. In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the Bad River Band the authority — known as “treatment as a state” — to set its own water-quality standards. A decade later, KBIC received the same authority.
Researchers are doing additional testing to identify possible sources of PFAS in Lake Superior. But contaminated sites already identified may hold clues. The chemicals have been found at the Duluth Air National Guard Base, adjacent to a PFAS-polluted creek that leads to Saint Louis Bay, at the southwestern corner of the lake in Minnesota; they were first detected at the Duluth air base in 2010, said Bioenvironmental Manager Maj. Ryan Blazevic of the 148th Fighter Wing in an email. The wing “no longer conducts fire protection training in a manner that discharges firefighting foam,” he said. (Firefighter training is a common source of PFAS at military bases.)
And last year, Michigan’s PFAS Action Response Team reported high levels of PFAS at Houghton County Memorial Airport. The airport is located immediately next to a creek that eventually flows to Keweenaw Bay. In September, Armstrong reported test results that show the creek had nearly twice the maximum level of PFOS permitted for groundwater in Michigan.
The state, which investigates PFAS-polluted municipal sites, is working to determine the extent of contamination at the airport. “Elevated concentrations of PFOS have been detected in storm water discharges from the airport,” Scott Dean, an EGLE spokesman, wrote in an email in December. “The investigation of PFAS discharging from the airport to surface waters and groundwater is ongoing.”
In October, some 80 years after American consumers began using PFAS, the Biden administration unveiled a broad plan to finally regulate them. The PFAS Strategic Roadmap directs the EPA, among other actions, to set a national standard to limit PFAS in drinking water; publish a list of PFAS as guidance for fish advisories; and sample fish in lakes to “better understand unique impacts on subsistence fishers, who may eat fish from contaminated waterbodies in higher quantities.” In an email, the EPA said it has monitored PFAS in Great Lakes fish since 2011 — and EPA sampling data indicates Lake Superior fish have, by far, the least PFAS among fish tested in the five lakes.
In the summer of 2020, Michigan adopted a strict standard to limit two of the most toxic PFAS in drinking water, at less than a quarter of the EPA’s current advisory level. States such as California, Maine and New York have passed laws to curb the chemicals in food and water. Wisconsin is in the process of setting limits for PFAS in drinking water and groundwater.
Leoso believes the federal government should do more to protect tribal regions from PFAS and other contaminants. But it will take voters to force lawmakers to regulate the large polluters, she notes, lamenting “the cumulative, man-made impacts on an entire culture of people.” She sees education as part of the solution, since many people are unaware of contaminants in their environment. In our industrial society, “we’ve made things that shouldn’t have been made,” she says. “We’ve put things together that shouldn’t have been put together, because they harm creation. And that’s something that we’ve become detached from.”
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