Tag Archives: Democracy

30th Anniversary of Free Elections in South Africa

Invitation to remember and celebrate in Benicia on Sunday, April 28

[Contribution by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast of Benicia]

Many of us were involved in anti-apartheid work, especially in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Thirty years ago this Saturday the new flag of national unity first flew over South Africa, and the first elections open to all races brought in a new era for South Africa—as well as a triumph of democracy in which the whole world could rejoice and be heartened. As we face into this crucial election year in the U.S. it’s good to remember the power of the vote and the power of the people.

On Sunday, April 28, I will be delivering a sermon/message in celebration of South Africa Freedom Day, recounting my experience as a peace monitor at the South Africa elections in 1994 and offering my reflections. You would be more than welcome to attend: 10 a.m. at Community Congregational Church, UCC, 1305 West 2nd St., Benicia.

Mary Susan Gast


More on Community Congregational UCC – https://www.cccucc.org

How good at spotting fake news are you? This 2-minute quiz will tell you

[Note from BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: While you may of course go directly to the quiz (with the warning that it takes a while to load), I highly recommend you take the time to review the startling – and deeply troubling – data the quiz has exposed to date. For those who are either very curious or very competitive, I scored 17/20 for veracity discernment, identifying 100% of the fake news headlines, with a distrust score of -3 for being a bit too skeptical and misclassifying real news as fake. Apparently, I scored better than 70% of the US population. Yikes.]

Take the Misinformation Susceptibility Test

‘Very online’ Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news 

From the University of Cambridge:

University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated “misinformation susceptibility test.”

The quick two-minute quiz gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that is flooding online spaces.

The test, proven to work through a series of experiments involving over 8,000 participants taking place over two years, has been deployed by polling organisation YouGov to determine how susceptible Americans are to fake headlines.

The first survey to use the new 20-point test, called ‘MIST’ by researchers and developed using an early version of ChatGPT, has found that – on average – adult US citizens correctly classified two-thirds (65%) of headlines they were shown as either real or fake.

However, the polling found that younger adults are worse than older adults at identifying false headlines, and that the more time someone spent online recreationally, the less likely they were to be able to tell real news from misinformation.

This runs counter to prevailing public attitudes regarding online misinformation spread, say researchers – that older, less digitally-savvy “boomers” are more likely to be taken in by fake news.

The study presenting the validated MIST is published in the journal Behavior Research Methods, and the polling is released today on the YouGov US website.

Researchers encourage the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app.

Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a “resilience” ranking that compares them to the wider US population. It takes under two minutes to complete.

“Misinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing democracies in the digital age,” said Prof Sander van der Linden, senior author of the MIST study, and head of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab.

“To understand where and how best to fight misinformation, we need a unified way of measuring susceptibility to fake news. That is what our test provides,” said van der Linden, author of the new book Foolproof.

The Cambridge team developed assessment tools that enabled them to work out the right level and mix of fake and genuine headlines to produce the most reliable results.

Examples of real news came from outlets such as the Pew Research Center and Reuters.

To create false but confusingly credible headlines – similar to misinformation encountered “in the wild” – in an unbiased way, researchers used artificial intelligence: ChatGPT version 2.

“When we needed a set of convincing but false headlines, we turned to GPT technology. The AI generated thousands of fake headlines in a matter of seconds. As researchers dedicated to fighting misinformation, it was eye-opening and alarming,” said Dr Rakoen Maertens, MIST lead author.

However, another recent study by the same team used GPT to produce useful questions for a variety of psychological surveys. “We encourage our fellow psychologists to embrace AI and help steer the technology in beneficial directions,” said MIST co-author Dr Friedrich Götz.

For the MIST, an international committee of misinformation experts whittled down the true and false headline selections. Variations of the survey were then tested extensively in experiments involving thousands of UK and US participants.

The latest YouGov survey saw 1,516 adult US citizens take the MIST in April 2023, and also respond to questions covering demographics, politics and online behaviour.

When it came to age, only 11% of 18-29 year olds got a high score (over 16 headlines correct), while 36% got a low score (10 headlines or under correct). By contrast, 36% of those 65 or older got a high score, while just 9% of older adults got a low score.

Additionally, the longer someone spent online for fun each day, the greater their susceptibility to misinformation, according to the MIST. Some 30% of those spending 0-2 recreation hours online each day got a high score, compared to just 15% of those spending 9 or more hours online.

The survey also analysed channels through which respondents receive their news. The “legacy media” came out top. For example, over 50% of those who got their news from the Associated Press, or NPR, or newer outlets such as Axios, achieved high scores.

Social media had the news audiences most susceptible to misinformation. Some 53% of those who got news from Snapchat received low scores, with just 4% getting high scores. Truth Social was a close second, followed by WhatsApp, TikTok and Instagram.

Democrats performed better than Republicans on the MIST, with 33% of Democrats achieving high scores, compared to just 14% of Republicans. However, almost a quarter of both parties’ followers were in the low-scoring bracket.

Perhaps alarmingly, half of all Americans now say they see what they believe to be misinformation online every day, according to the YouGov poll.

Dr Maertens added: “Younger people increasingly turn to social media to find out about the world, but these channels are awash with misinformation.

“Approaches to media literacy, as well as algorithms and platform design, require an urgent rethink.”

“The MIST will allow us to verify the effectiveness of interventions to tackle fake news. We want to explore why some people are more resilient to misinformation, and what we can learn from them.”

Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how to tackle both

Democracies are making more progress than autocracies when it comes to climate action. But divestment campaigns can put pressure on the most recalcitrant of political leaders
Autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

The Guardian, by Bill McKibben, Mon 11 Apr 2022

At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had:

  • A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”).
  • Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few back rooms.
  • Earnest protesters with excellent signs (“The wrong Amazon is burning”).

But as I wandered the halls and the streets outside, it struck me again and again that a good deal had changed since the last big climate confab in Paris in 2015 – and not just because carbon levels and the temperature had risen ever higher.

The biggest shift was in the political climate. Over those few years the world seemed to have swerved sharply away from democracy and toward autocracy – and in the process dramatically limited our ability to fight the climate crisis. Oligarchs of many kinds had grabbed power and were using it to uphold the status quo; there was a Potemkin quality to the whole gathering, as if everyone was reciting a script that no longer reflected the actual politics of the planet.

Now that we’ve watched Russia launch an oil-fired invasion of Ukraine, it’s a little easier to see this trend in high relief – but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples.

Brazil, in 2015 at Paris, had been led by Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ party, which had for the most part worked to limit deforestation in the Amazon. In some ways the country could claim to have done more than any other on climate damage, simply by slowing the cutting. But in 2021 Jair Bolsonaro was in charge, at the head of a government that empowered every big-time cattle rancher and mahogany poacher in the country. If people cared about the climate, he said, they could eat less and “poop every other day”. And if they cared about democracy, they could … go to jail. “Only God can take me from the presidency,” he explained ahead of this year’s elections.

A climate activist holds a sign depicting Jair Bolsonaro with the slogan ‘Exterminator of the Future’. Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

Or India, which may turn out to be the most pivotal nation given the projected increases in its energy use – and which had refused its equivalent of Greta Thunberg even a visa to attend the meeting. (At least Disha Ravi was no longer in jail).

Or Russia (about which more in a minute) or China – a decade ago we could still, albeit with some hazard and some care, hold climate protests and demonstrations in Beijing. Don’t try that now.

Or, of course, the US, whose deep democratic deficits have long haunted climate negotiations. The reason we have a system of voluntary pledges, not a binding global agreement, is that the world finally figured out there would never be 66 votes in the US Senate for a real treaty.

Joe Biden had expected to arrive at the talks with the Build Back Better bill in his back pocket, slap it down on the table, and start a bidding war with the Chinese – but the other Joe, Manchin of West Virginia, the biggest single recipient of fossil fuel cash in DC, made sure that didn’t happen. Instead Biden showed up empty-handed and the talks fizzled.

And so we were left contemplating a world whose people badly want action on climate change, but whose systems aren’t delivering it. In 2021 the UN Development Programme conducted a remarkable poll, across the planet – they questioned people through video-game networks to reach humans less likely to answer traditional surveys. Even amid the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency”, and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play”. As the UNDP director, Achim Steiner, summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level”.

The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally yearned for less democracy, not more. Surely if we just had strongmen in power everywhere they could just make the hard decisions and put us on the right path – we wouldn’t have to mess with the constant vagaries of elections and lobbying and influence.

But this is wrong for at least one moral reason – strongmen capable of acting instantly on the climate crisis are also capable of acting instantly on any number of other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify were they allowed to talk. It’s also wrong for a number of practical ones.

Those practical problems begin with the fact that autocrats have their own vested interests to please – Modi campaigned for his role atop the world’s largest democracy on the corporate jet of Adani, the largest coal company in the subcontinent. Don’t assume for a minute that there’s not a fossil fuel lobby in China; right now it’s busy telling Xi that economic growth depends on more coal.

And beyond that, autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel. The crucial thing about oil and gas is that it is concentrated in a few spots around the world, and hence the people who live on top of or otherwise control those spots end up with huge amounts of unwarranted and unaccountable power.

Boris Johnson was just off in Saudi Arabia trying to round up some hydrocarbons – the day after the king beheaded 81 folks he didn’t like. Would anyone pay the slightest attention to the Saudi royal family if they did not possess oil? No. Nor would the Koch brothers have been able to dominate American politics on the basis of their ideas –when David Koch ran for the White House on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 he got almost no votes. So he and his brother Charles decided to use their winnings as America’s largest oil and gas barons to buy the GOP, and the rest is (dysfunctional) political history.

The most striking example of this phenomenon, it hardly need be said, is Vladimir Putin, a man whose power rests almost entirely on the production of stuff that you can burn. If I wandered through my house, it would be no problem to find electronics from China, textiles from India, all manner of goods from the EU – but there’s nothing anywhere that would say “made in Russia”. Sixty per cent of the export earnings that equipped his army came from oil and gas, and all the political clout that has cowed western Europe for decades came from his fingers on the gas spigot. He and his hideous war are the product of fossil fuel, and his fossil fuel interests have done much to corrupt the rest of the world.

Vladimir Putin and Alexei Miller, CEO of Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, attend a ceremony to mark the launch of the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok natural gas pipeline in 2011. Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

It’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, wears the Order of Friendship, personally pinned on his lapel by Putin in thanks for the vast investments Tillerson’s firm (that would be Exxon) had made in the Arctic – a region opened to their exploitation by the fact that it had, um, melted. And these guys stick together: it’s entirely unsurprising that when Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks and Amazon quit Russia last month, Koch Industries announced that it was staying put. The family business began, after all, by building refineries for Stalin.

Another way of saying this is that hydrocarbons by their nature tend towards the support of despotism – they’re highly dense in energy and hence very valuable; geography and geology means they can be controlled with relative ease. There’s one pipeline, one oil terminal.

Whereas sun and wind are, in these terms, much closer to democratic: they’re available everywhere, diffuse instead of concentrated. I can’t have an oilwell in my backyard because, as with almost all backyards, there is no oil there. Even if there was an oilwell, I would have to sell what I pumped to some refiner, and since I’m American, that would likely be a Koch enterprise. But I can (and do) have a solar panel on my roof; my wife and I rule our own tiny oligarchy, insulated from the market forces the Putins and the Kochs can unleash and exploit. The cost of energy delivered by the sun has not risen this year, and it will not rise next year.

As a general rule of thumb, those territories with the healthiest, least-captive-to-vested-interest democracies are making the most progress on climate change. Look around the world at Iceland or Costa Rica, around Europe at Finland or Spain, around the US at California or New York. So part of the job for climate campaigners is to work for functioning democratic states, where people’s demands for a working future will be prioritized over vested interest, ideology and personal fiefdoms.

But given the time constraints that physics impose – the need for rapid action everywhere – that can’t be the whole strategy. In fact, activists have arguably been a little too focused on politics as a source of change, and paid not quite enough attention to the other power center in our civilization: money.

If we could somehow persuade or force the world’s financial giants to change, that would yield quick progress as well. Maybe quicker, since speed is more a hallmark of stock exchanges than parliaments.

And here the news is a little better. Take my country as an example. Political power has come to rest in the reddest, most corrupt parts of America. The senators representing a relative handful of people in sparsely populated western states are able to tie up our political life, and those senators are almost all on the payroll of big oil. But money has collected in the blue parts of the country – Biden-voting counties account for 70% of the country’s economy.

That’s one reason some of us have worked so hard on campaigns like fossil fuel divestment – we won big victories with New York’s pension funds and with California’s vast university system, and so were able to put real pressure on big oil. Now we’re doing the same with the huge banks that are the industry’s financial lifeline. We’re well aware that we may never win over Montana or Mississippi, so we better have some solutions that don’t depend on doing so.

The same thing’s true globally. We may not be able to advocate in Beijing or Moscow or, increasingly, in Delhi. So, at least for these purposes, it’s useful that the biggest pots of money remain in Manhattan, in London, in Frankfurt, in Tokyo. These are places we still can make some noise.

And they are places where there’s some real chance of that noise being heard. Governments tend to favor people who’ve already made their fortune, industries that are already ascendant: that’s who comes with blocs of employees who vote, and that’s who can afford the bribes. But investors are all about who’s going to make money next. That’s why Tesla is worth far more than General Motors in the stock market, if not in the halls of Congress.

Moreover, if we can persuade the world of money to act, it’s capable of doing so quickly. Should, say, Chase Bank, currently the biggest lender on earth to fossil fuel, announce this year that it was quickly phasing out that support, the news would ripple out across stock markets in the matter of hours. That’s why some of us have felt it worthwhile to mount increasingly larger campaigns against these financial institutions, and to head off to jail from their lobbies.

The world of money is at least as unbalanced and unfair as the world of political power – but in ways that may make it a little easier for climate advocates to make progress.

Putin’s grotesque war might be where some of these strands come together. It highlights the ways that fossil fuel builds autocracy, and the power that control of scarce supplies gives to autocrats. It’s also shown us the power of financial systems to put pressure on the most recalcitrant political leaders: Russia is being systematically and effectively punished by bankers and corporations, though as my Ukrainian colleague Svitlana Romanko and I pointed out recently, they could be doing far more. The shock of the war may also be strengthening the resolve and unity of the world’s remaining democracies and perhaps – one can hope – diminishing the attraction of would-be despots like Donald Trump.

But we’ve got years, not decades, to get the climate crisis under some kind of control. We won’t get more moments like this. The brave people of Ukraine may be fighting for more than they can know.

  • This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story

Benicia Author Stephen Golub – To Beat Trump’s Big “Stolen Election” Lie, Promote the Big Truth

Hitler, the Confederacy and today’s authoritarians show the price we could pay for not pushing back in a big way.

By Stephen Golub, A Promised Land, February 18, 2021

One Month Later

It’s been almost a month since Twitterless Donald Trump flounced down to Florida. Some hoped that, having lost his presidential and social media platforms, his Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen would flame out.

No such luck. In voting to acquit him at his impeachment trial, 43 out of 50 Republican senators yet again caved to his control. In the HouseArizonaTexas and Michigan, his loyalists keep pushing his party line or pushing out figures who don’t fall in line.

Left unchecked, democracy-destroying lies don’t die. Hitler exploited a Big Lie, which blamed Germany’s World War I defeat on a “stab in the back” by Jews and leftists, to spur the Nazis’ rise to power. Today’s authoritarians in Hungary, TurkeyRussia and Poland similarly twist history to seek to cement their rule. The Lost Cause myth, which cast the Confederacy as a noble endeavor, and which survives and even thrives in some states today, buttressed over a century of racist repression of Southern Blacks.

Such havoc can happen here. In fact, it’s already started. The impeachment managers’ presentations documented how the Big Lie has already fomented vitriol and violence, above and beyond the January 6 fatalities and injuries. The rot includes the Capitol rioters’ death threats against Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, an attempt in Texas to run Biden backers’ bus off the road and the militant Proud Boys’ pride in Trump’s support.

What’s more, up to 82 percent of Trump voters and well over half of Republican House members buy into at least some version of his bogus narrative. And lest there be any doubt, there’s ample evidence that Trump knows he’s lying about the election.

Even if his sway fades, likely 2024 candidates like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz could keep pressing the point to fuel further division and even violence. In historian Timothy Snyder words, “The lie outlasts the liar.”

Tell the Truth

What to do in the face of all this? As Mitt Romney memorably put it on January 6, “The best way we could show respect for the voters who were upset is by telling them the truth.”

That’s why we need persistent, multipronged efforts to promote the Big Truth: Joe Biden won a free and fair election.

Here are some ideas about what those efforts could feature:

A Truth Commission. South Africa and many other nations have assembled such panels to document  and address their respective histories of war, repression or human rights abuses. Unlike these deep dives, the American version could quickly pull together and propagate the overwhelming evidence of the Big Truth.

This work could be one aspect of the “9/11-type commission” proposed by Pelosi. Or it  might best be unofficial in nature, since a government-appointed body could feed conspiracist fantasies and prove otherwise problematic. Who organizes the panel is less important than the bipartisan, respected figures who constitute it.

The Messenger is the Message. The power of Arnold Schwarzenneger’s recent, intensely personal video on the “lies, and lies, and lies” behind the Nazis’ Kristallnacht in his native Austria flows not just from the history he recites but from the famous macho man reciting it. In their song “Undivided,” country music stars Tyler Hubbard and Tim McGraw frame faith, patriotism, tolerance and unity in terms appealing to their fans.

Given their activist orientations and broad appeals, celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift could play similar roles. But tweets, PSAs and outreach by previously unengaged movie, military, athletic and other heroes might also help bring the truth to light.

Democracy Won. Though the obvious upshot of all this is that Joe Biden is our legitimate president, the core message is not about Democrats or Republicans. Democracy won on November 3, in that our democratic practices and principles prevailed.

Go Legitimately Low. Michelle Obama’s laudable 2016 declaration, “When they go low, we go high,” only goes so far in effectively countering the Big Lie. There’s nothing wrong with shining a harsh but accurate light on the price we pay for denying the truth. The Lincoln Project has made an artform of such ads. Circulating powerful videos, like the horrid January 6 clip of a police officer beaten with a pole bearing the American flag on the Capitol steps, can also dramatize the un-American danger the Big Lie brings.

Call Out the Big Liars. Turn the tables on the many Republican officials who are trying to turn the GOP into the Trump Party. Through speeches, social media, ads and other advocacy, call it by that name in order to exploit how unpopular he is with the majority of Americans. Or call it the Big Lie Party, or the Anti-democracy Party.

Call Out the Elusive Liars. In a related vein, Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, the conservative anti-Trump site, offers this suggestion for putting anti-democracy Republicans on the spot if they try to side-step the issue:

A proposal for reporters covering Republican candidates and officeholders over the next four years:

Every interview should begin with two questions.

Sir/Ma’am, I need one-word answers from you:

1. Who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election?

2. Was this the legitimate result of a free and fair election?

This shouldn’t take long. The questions can be asked in less than 5 seconds. The answers are one word each: “Biden” and “yes.”

Any Republican candidate or officeholder who refuses to answer, or who tries to elide the question by saying something like, “Joe Biden is the president,” should be asked again. And again. And again.

Keep Beating the Drum. The Big Lie won’t rest. The Big Truth can’t either. Messages must be repeated many times over time in order to sink in. Creative ways can be found to hammer home the truth without being boring.

Look Toward the Future. The Big Truth is about more than setting straight the recent past. It’s also about the future. Fueled by the Big Lie, over 100 voter suppression bills have already been filed in 28 states in 2021. Persuading people that the 2020 election was free and fair could positively impact the voter protection battles that will roil 2022 and 2024.

Other truth-promoting efforts could include financial pressure on corporations to keep withholding funds from Big Lie-propagating political action committees; keeping the lid on Trump’s fabrication-fostering and violence-inducing social media access, particularly since online misinformation about election fraud dropped dramatically after Twitter dumped Trump; and journalists adopting Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan’s excellent ideas on vanquishing the Big Lie.

Even Modest Persuasion Could Prove Pivotal

Having said all this, this is not to say that most Big Lie devotees will reverse course if shown the facts. Too many are too resistant. But some absolutist truth deniers may become only doubters. Some doubters  may become persuaded.

Even a modest amount of persuasion could make the difference between whether our democracy lives or dies in the years ahead. This is especially crucial in view of how closely divided our representative institutions are today, between democrats and anti-democrats. Convincing relatively few folks of the truth could prove decisive.

America dodged a bullet on November 3. If fewer than 22,000 votes had switched from Biden to Trump in three states, or if Trump had been just a bit more strategic rather than self-defeating during the campaign – something a would-be autocratic candidate could well be in 2024 – the world would be a much darker place today.

The battle for our democracy began rather than ended with Trump’s defeat. Simply fretting over the Big Lie won’t cut it. Nor will wanting to wish it away or pretending we can ignore it.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.


Stephen Golub, Benicia – A Promised Land: Politics. Policy. America as a Developing Country.

Benicia resident Stephen Golub offers excellent perspective on his blog, A Promised Land:  Politics. Policy. America as a Developing Country.

To access his other posts or subscribe, please go to his blog site, A Promised Land.