Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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July 31
The Washington Post says democracy doesn’t require truth police
It became fashionable a few years ago for people to blame “misinformation” for others holding views they find wrongheaded. Social media platforms, sometimes jawboned by the federal government, invoked this supposed crisis to justify censorship, especially during the pandemic. This insulted the intelligence of the American people, who can make up their own minds without being told what to think.
A new study explores how exposure to “misinformation” on social media affected voters in 2020. The answer, drawn from a three-month experiment on nearly 16,000 users, is very little.
Academics received rare access to internal data from Facebook and Instagram. They considered “problematic” content anything posted by sources that Meta’s third-party fact-checkers had repeatedly flagged for spreading falsehoods. That material turns out to have reached a small, self-selected audience that had already made up its mind.
Stripping it from their feeds for three months changed what they believed by approximately zero.
Three companion experiments from the same project made other large changes to what users saw in their feeds, and none of these interventions moved beliefs either.
The hysteria around “misinformation” assumes democracy runs on unvarnished truth. It doesn’t. It runs on persuasion, with rival camps making their best case to loud and stubborn voters, under procedures everyone can accept.
Political scientists established long ago that people have always leaned toward voting along their identities and loyalties. The era of machine politics did not destroy the republic, nor will social media. Those hell-bent on defeating “misinformation” are trying to re-create a system that never really existed.
The challenge today is that social media supercharges the factionalism that has always plagued the body politic. Rather than serving as a conduit for information, it becomes an echo chamber. Users choose whom they interact with, which typically means gravitating toward like-minded people. This is why anti-vaccine activists thrived on platforms like Facebook.
˛ÝÝ®´«Ă˝papers play an essential role in reporting facts and publishing opinions, but the mainstream media’s gatekeeping power has diminished in recent decades amid declining trust across institutions.
Combating this problem, however, was never going to be as simple as taking down inaccurate content. The trouble with fighting “misinformation” is that someone must be a final arbiter of truth, and the fight over who gets to play that role ends up politicizing everything.
That’s why the best response to false speech, however odious, will always be more speech. The American system depends on vigorous debates forging public sentiment. Stifling unpopular ideas usually backfires.
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Aug. 2
The Wall Street Journal on another Donald Trump “deal” with Iran
A friend quipped the other day that President Trump truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already ended the Iran war eight times. Will the ninth time be the charm after his latest decision to call off a military escalation in search of a deal with the revolutionary regime?
“We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” Mr. Trump posted at 10:05 p.m. on Saturday. He added that this includes “Immediate, Complete, and Total” opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Trump offered no other details. It also isn’t clear how this miraculous turn of events happened so quickly after Mr. Trump had been building all week to a military response. Journal reporters said Friday Mr. Trump had made a decision to escalate.
Saudi Arabia’s national news agency reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had asked Mr. Trump to stand down, perhaps fearful that its oil facilities and tankers would become a target of Iran in the Gulf and Iran’s Houthi proxy in the Red Sea. If that’s true, it’s another sign that Iran now has escalation dominance in this conflict.
Iran hasn’t said much as we write this, and leaks from negotiators suggest the familiar confusing intercessions from Oman and Qatar. It seems unlikely that Iran has agreed to much on its nuclear program after the June 17 memorandum of understanding (MOU) offered little in the way of concessions.
As for the Strait, Mr. Trump’s latest threats of escalation followed Iran’s attacks on shipping that tried to pass without its permission—as well as an unprovoked missile attack last week on a U.S. base in Jordan.
By now it’s clear that this up and down, back and forth, from war of annihilation to peace in our time is Mr. Trump’s chaotic way of war. He may think it keeps the enemy guessing, but it also keeps the American public unsure of what his war aims are or how he hopes to achieve them. No wonder the polls show voters have soured on the war. If Mr. Trump did restart the bombing, it isn’t even clear what his strategic purpose would be, other than hoping that it would cause the regime to sign what he calls a “DEAL.”
It’s been clear since Mr. Trump agreed to a cease-fire in April that he wants out of the war. He’s worried about the impact on the economy from higher oil prices, or, as he memorably put it, becoming the next Herbert Hoover. He also wants lower gas prices going into the midterm election, especially as his approval rating falls below Joe Biden’s and Barack Obama’s at a comparable period in their terms.
Iran’s regime knows signals of weakness when it hears them. It interpreted the poorly drafted MOU as an opening to let it control the Strait and has kept taunting Mr. Trump with attacks on U.S. allies and bases. Mr. Trump lashes out with a tit-for-tat bombing response that so far hasn’t caused Iran to bend.
Iran also knows Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers who didn’t want the President to attack Iran at all and now want the conflict over on nearly any available terms. His aides think the cost of further fighting is higher than the damage to U.S. (and Mr. Trump’s) credibility from a cease-fire that cedes the initiative in the Gulf to Iran. The death of Sen. Lindsey Graham removed a rare hawkish counselor.
Has Iran now finally agreed to terms that can plausibly be called a U.S. victory, as Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post suggested? Recall that when the MOU was signed, Mr. Trump’s negotiators hailed the result, and claimed the regime had turned a “new leaf,” as Vice President JD Vance put it, and wanted to become a “normal country,” despite 47 years of promoting terror and regional revolution.
As ever, it pays to watch what Iran does, not what the regime and Mr. Trump say it will do.
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Aug. 2
The Philadelphia Inquirer on Donald Trump and the potential for election interference
A casual observer might believe Donald Trump when he says he doesn’t care about the coming midterm elections. Based on the historical record, the president’s basement-dwelling approval rating alone should dismay Republicans on Capitol Hill, and yet he is taking none of the usual steps to shore up his party’s prospects.
On the contrary, he has persisted in an unpopular and unsuccessful war, reinstituted inflationary tariffs, obsessed over a $600 million ballroom, and refused to sign one of the few substantive bills passed by the GOP-controlled Congress.
But Trump’s midterm strategy, like his broader political philosophy, is one of subtraction, not addition. Rather than persuade Americans to vote for his fellow Republicans, he prefers to stop people from voting against them. In terms of the effort to suppress rather than win votes, his campaign looks downright frenetic.
A key chokepoint of this block-the-vote strategy is the mail, controlled as it is by the federal government. Despite taking advantage of the convenience himself as recently as last spring, Trump has been menacing mailed ballots since his botched COVID-19 response helped dramatically boost remote voting. He continued to do so Monday, when his administration petitioned the Supreme Court to let the U.S. Postal Service assume the novel duty of not delivering mail, namely ballots that tend to favor Democrats.
At issue is his executive order directing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state, to be used by postal officials to interfere with the election. The Justice Department has demanded voter data from all the states under the order, leading to continuing legal disputes with many of them. Ruling on a lawsuit by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and 20 other states in June, a federal court in Massachusetts blocked the order; recently, an appellate court agreed. As U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted persuasively, “the Constitution does not grant the president any specific powers over elections.”
Administration lawyers nevertheless filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, and who can blame them for trying? The high court’s conservative majority has rescued Trump from accountability for the plot against the 2020 election, taken a jackhammer to the political independence of agencies such as the Postal Service, and enabled states to eliminate districts that are mostly made up of people of color, which tend to lean Democratic.
Last month, however, the court surprised many observers by narrowly upholding laws in Mississippi and many other states allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted even if they are delivered subsequently. Should a majority of the justices make another relatively rare decision to side with the Constitution over the president in the latest mail-in ballot case, the administration has other antidemocratic endeavors in the works.
Even if the Postal Service is prevented from actively targeting ballots, underfunding and consolidation of services could slow their postmarking and delivery to the point of ineligibility. Officials in California believe the agency’s glacial processing may have contributed to the disenfranchisement of nearly 150,000 voters in last spring’s primary election.
Trump has also been browbeating Republican senators for months over legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require a passport or birth certificate to vote — documents that tens of millions of Americans don’t have at hand. Trump has held up reauthorization of intelligence authorities, refused to sign bipartisan housing legislation, and demanded that the Senate kill the filibuster and cancel its August recess to pass the bill. Majority Leader John Thune’s consistent answer has been that Senate Republicans don’t — ironically enough — have the votes.
The administration can likely be counted on to resort to more jackbooted tactics as the election approaches. Trump has suggested he would be willing to send federal troops and agents to the polls to intimidate voters in violation of federal law. His record of using federal forces against Democratic-leaning states and cities is already extensive.
Even the successful completion of a free and fair election won’t necessarily be the end of Trump’s efforts to undermine it, as we learned when he tried to reverse a result at the expense of millions of voters in Pennsylvania and other battleground states six years ago. In his recent primetime address, the president was still harping on his 2020 loss — which his new national intelligence director just refused to acknowledge — while laying the groundwork for future interference.
These tactics failed then, however, and robust public participation and vigilance can ensure that they do so again. The administration’s conspiracy against the election shows Trump still fears the will of the people. He should.
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July 31
The Houston Chronicle says resistance isn’t enough, we must imagine a new way forward
Before sunrise on an October morning in 1989, Ida Lee Delaney was making her long daily commute to her job as a custodian at the Houston Post. After the 50-year-old woman inadvertently cut in front of an unmarked car on the Gulf Freeway, the driver and his two companions responded by chasing her for 13 miles across Houston.
What Delaney didn’t know was that the three men were off-duty Houston police officers coming home after an all-night drinking spree. Having no idea who they were, she pulled over and got out of her vehicle to seek help when she saw the flashing lights of a truck belonging to a highway work crew. The unmarked car screeched to a halt behind her, and a man brandishing a gun ran up to her car and punched her. Reaching for a gun she kept in the car, she shot and wounded the man. He shot and killed her.
All three officers were fired; only Alex Gonzales, who killed Delaney, was charged. The case was removed to Dallas, where a jury convicted him of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced him to seven years in prison. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and Gonzales got off with 180 days in jail, two years’ probation and a $5,000 fine. (Houston paid the Delaney family $650,000 to settle a civil lawsuit.)
These days, nearly four decades later, even such meager crumbs of accountability seem unlikely after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on Houston’s East Side and another agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Me. These men may not have been inebriated, but they were surely drunk. Drunk on power, perhaps on adrenaline.
David Brouillette, the agent who shot 25-year-old Guerrero four times during an attempted traffic stop in the small coastal town where he lived, should never have been near a gun, should never have been handed a law-enforcement badge.
One of Brouillette’s ex-wives shared a voice mail with NPR in which he says that she and the women in her family should have their throats cut. “Am I threatening that I’m gonna do that? No, no. But do I think that you should have your f____ throat cuts? Or should have had them cut. Yep,” the voice mail says.
The Associated Press obtained hundreds of family court records detailing allegations of physical and verbal abuse.
This is the man ICE hired, with insufficient background inquiries and inadequate training, and then entrusted him with weapons and the authority to roam in unmarked cars through American cities. This is the man, one of thousands hired in a headlong rush to staff up, who apparently has been given the authority to ram vehicles and run them off the road, shoot through windshields and rolled-down windows and even drag victims out of their car, handcuffing them while they lay dying on the street.
Brouillette and his ICE cohorts are the public faces of a federal law enforcement agency — operating in our name with an obscene amount of congressionally appropriated money — that has the authority to arrest men, women and children and either deposit them in fetid detention centers or deport them without a hearing to foreign countries where they may never have lived. Surely, only the most fervid supporters of White House advisor Stephen Miller’s mass-deportation obsession believe that we are safer with a masked and brutish force operating at will in our midst. Only the most extreme among them believe that we are safer when Guerrero and Salgado and thousands like them no longer share our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our schools and places of worship.
Nearly 70% of Houston-area residents — including Harris, Ford Bend and Montgomery Counties — disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, according to a University of Houston survey. And that was before agents killed one of our own.
When Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in the wake of the killings, issued a directive that ICE agents would no longer be allowed to rely on traffic stops, the president countermanded him. Got to keep those quotas up toward the goal of a million deportations a year — or Miller gets mad. Got to go after not only “the worst of the worst,” but also international students, green-card holders, asylum-seekers and so-called “alien enemies.”
Years ago, in Houston, the officer who killed Ida Lee Delaney got off with a slap on the wrist, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Something else happened back then that reverberates in Houston today. In response to citizen protests and demonstrations led by Ada Edwards, the Houston City Council created a civilian review committee. Though it lacks teeth, the committee was empowered to review internal police reports about officer misconduct and pass along its recommendations to the police chief. In 1999, then-Police Chief Clarence Bradford told the Houston Press that his department a decade after the shooting was “a more diverse and open organization and that officers themselves are now less tolerant of misconduct by their colleagues.”
Houstonians got results, but must remain vigilant. So what recourse do Houstonians and their fellow Americans have today to shut down a rogue federal police force that’s potentially a danger to all of us?
We applaud U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia for hosting a congressional forum in Houston in an effort to find out why ICE agents killed Salgado, but the Houston lawmaker is a Democrat, and Democrats have about as much power and influence in Trump’s Washington as the White House ethics adviser. A Republican-controlled Congress — lawmakers scared of Trump, not their constituents — responds to the outrage in American cities and towns by shoveling more money than ICE can ever spend into its bulging coffers.
Obviously, the Trump administration has no interest in investigating the possibility that maybe, just maybe, ICE agents have abused people. And certainly, the administration has no interest in prosecuting. It even refuses to share evidence with local police departments and with prosecutors in Minneapolis and other local jurisdictions attempting to conduct their own investigations. On the other hand, the administration is quick to investigate people who protest ICE’s bullying tactics.
That leaves the third branch of government. Federal judges across the country, including a number appointed by Trump, have attempted to rein in an out-of-control ICE, ruling in more than 16,400 cases, for example, against the administration’s strategy of indefinitely detaining people it seeks to deport. Dozens of judges have ordered that detainees be released or given bond hearings, but ICE officials have frequently defied or ignored the court rulings. In the words of District Judge Mike Davis, the government has “stretch (ed) the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”
With “an inert Congress” — former UT-Austin law professor Stephen Vladeck’s description — and an overburdened judicial system, we are all stretched to the breaking point by this administration. Voting in November is critical, certainly, but meanwhile our only choice, as in Houston years ago, is to resist, to speak out.
Resistance alone, however, is not enough. Even voting new leaders to Washington will not on its own bring about the change we need. As we have written many times before, Houstonians have a special obligation to imagine a different future. One rooted in our everyday reality of streets plied by white work vans filled with people like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo working from the pre-dawn hours late into the evening so their children can have opportunities they didn’t.
Houstonians should demand policy solutions that balance border security with compassion. Workers’ rights with corporate interests. We don’t want a return to the chaos during the Biden years. In the past we have held up the likes of the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan and President George H.W. Bush as Houstonians who led the nation on immigration. Truth is, we need a new generation of leaders who pass forward-looking solutions to our profoundly broken immigration system. Because right now, even the most modest immigration reform efforts, such as the bipartisan Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, are basically dead-on-arrival in Washington.
Skeptics ask why Salgado didn’t get in line and fix his immigration status? Congress has failed to create a viable line for people like him who have paid taxes for over 30 years and raised children here.
So yes, take to the streets, but also listen, learn and imagine. Demand town hall gatherings. Put forward ideas and insist on answers from elected representatives. We are Americans living through the 250th anniversary of our nation’s foundational resistance to a government that showed no respect toward its people. As Texans, as Americans, we have a tradition to uphold. An obligation to act.
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The Guardian on a global effort to make multinational corporations
Governments are told that public services must shrink because money is tight. Yet a new Tax Justice Network report says that countries could capture an extra $500bn a year without raising corporate tax rates. The answer is to tax multinational profits where real economic activity happens – known as unitary taxation. No new profit is created. Revenue simply shifts from tax havens where profits are “booked” to the countries where workers produce and customers spend.
Making that principle a global tax standard depends on UN talks opening in New York on Monday. Modelled on the UN climate regime, a fiscal framework convention would create the governing body and procedures, with protocols providing detailed rules. The UN wants agreement by late 2027. Donald Trump’s US walked out last year and urged others to follow. None did.
Rich countries gain most when firms pay tax where people work, not where profits vanish in havens, because their economies are the largest. Britain would collect about £13bn extra a year in tax receipts – two‑thirds of the cost of an NHS-style social care system. EU governments could raise enough to quadruple climate-adaptation spending. Poorer countries also benefit. The report calculates that the global south would receive $156bn in one year – more than the International Monetary Fund has outstanding in loans to those nations.
For the first time in decades, multinationals could be taxed where they actually do business. Rules built for the corporate world of the 1920s – when national industrial giants dominated – would finally confront today’s companies organised around intangible assets and global supply chains, as well as profits of an altogether different scale. In 1929, General Motors made the equivalent of $4.7bn. Apple’s profit last year was $112bn. What the report calls “diversified” tax havens such as Switzerland and the Netherlands could offset losses by raising rates. Pure booking centres such as the Cayman Islands could not.
The talks suggest states are beginning to reclaim powers surrendered under globalisation to corporate lawyers and private tribunals. One protocol would let countries tax digital and other cross-border services without waiting for firms to establish domestic offices, blunting Mr Trump’s trade threats. A second could go further, shifting tax disputes from secretive investor-state arbitration into a more open, publicly accountable UN-led system.
The direction is unmistakable. Ireland, which is facing an estimated $11bn annual tax loss, has already begun putting aside part of its “windfall corporate tax receipts” in a new fund – an admission that the revenue won’t last. India and Nigeria have legislated so that companies profiting from their economies should not escape the tax net just because they operate across borders.
Britain has belatedly backed a UN-led shift towards taxing real activity. Defending rules entwined with its offshore network was politically indefensible and economically perverse. The US can sit out the negotiations, but it cannot shield American companies from others’ rules. The success of these talks has largely been down to African nations insisting on consensus where possible and majority rule where necessary. That denies the US and any rich-country bloc an effective veto. Backed by India, Brazil and other developing powers, an African-led coalition can now press a simple claim: countries should be free to tax value created within their economies. Britain should help them prevail.
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