Sometimes everyone sees a space and rushes to fill it at the same time. There was that time in like 2008 where every fifth shop in London turned into a milkshake parlour that smushed up whole chocolate bars. Or fancy burger joint. Or bubble tea seller.

Something similar happens with parties. For a moment in 2019, the UK was sprouting ‘new centrist’ parties, at least on paper, though most never fielded an actual candidate.

Israel’s going through this with right-wing parties at the moment. There are new, small right-wing parties and newly-small right-wing parties and old, small right-wing parties. Pro-Netanyahu right-wing parties, Anti-Netanyahu right-wing parties and strategically vague right-wing parties.

Here’s a rundown of who they are:

Reservists party / Zionist Home - Yoaz Hendel and Hili Tropper

Yoaz Hendel first came to widespread public attention in 2012. A few months earlier, he’d been appointed the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy in prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. Hendel discovered that a senior Netanyahu advisor, Natan Eshel, had been taking non-consensual intimate photos of a woman working in the office. He and other colleagues took their evidence to the Attorney General. Netanyahu, furious at Hendel, demanded his resignation.

In 2020, he was part of Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party list which entered a coalition with Netanyahu after a long electoral stalemate, becoming Communications Minister, but ended up stepping away from politics before the 2022 election.

After the October 7, 2023 attacks, Hendel set up an advocacy group called “HaMiluimnikim”, the reservists. The group campaigned for applying the military draft to Haredim and also advocated for reservists, many of whom ended up serving for months and losing their businesses and home relationships. In 2025 he converted this group into a political party.

The Reservists was also the first new right-wing party to merge with another… Hili Tropper’s almost-party.

Hili Tropper, another Blue and White MK and former minister, resigned from his party in May and began moves to set up a centre-right party with a focus on Zionism, national unity etc etc. In July, he announced he’d be merging his outfit with Hendel’s, forming a group called “Zionist Home”.

Zionist Home was the first new right-wing party and has hovered around the magic 3.25% threshold. Some polls show it winning 4 seats. Others, especially more recent polls, have it dropping below the threshold and getting nothing.

The party as a whole hasn’t aligned itself formally with either Netanyahu or the opposition. Early on, it said it’ll sit with either, though more recently Hili Tropper pretty much ruled out Netanyahu. It’s strongly in favour of a Haredi draft. And, importantly, it hasn’t said who it will recommend as prime minister to the president,.

People of Israel - Ofer Winter

Ofer Winter was an IDF general known for his right-wing views. When the IDF’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi didn’t promote him and later asked for his retirement in 2024, it was a minor scandal in right-wing circles.

Winter had long been rumoured to have an interest in entering politics. Netanyahu reportedly offered him a guaranteed spot on the Likud list, but he refused and last week announced the formation of a new party: Amcha Yisrael, a liturgical name that’s being translated as “People of Israel”.

Winter’s party has an eclectic list. The number two spot goes to Yoseph Haddad, an
Arab-Israeli Christian from Haifa who’s known as a pro-Israel activist online and in person. His list includes bereaved family members, former journalists and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahum.

His most prominent and well-known policy is to cause the “mass emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, a euphemism that seems to mean ethnic cleansing.

Winter’s party is also very insistent that Haredim must do military service, and he’s highly critical of the Netanyahu government’s attempts to exempt them.

Winter’s been explicit: he’s right-wing; Netanyahu is the leader of the Israeli right; and therefore his party will recommend Netanyahu.

But Netanyahu is, by all accounts, freaking out about Winter’s entry into the race — partly because he’s drawing votes away from the established right-wing parties and might knock them below the threshold, and partly because (he claims) Winter may, in the end, join the opposition.

Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein’s Unity Party

Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein are two Likud stalwarts. Well, they were, anyway. Edelstein was a former Soviet refusenik who was sent to Siberia, and served as Knesset speaker and various ministerial roles. Erdan came up through Likud, also held a bunch of ministerial portfolios and was then appointed Israel’s ambassador to the UN and (briefly) the USA.

Edelstein got himself on Netanyahu’s bad side by declaring he’d run against him for the Likud leadership in 2021-2. He never actually stood, but that was enough to put him in the doghouse. Denied a ministerial role in the previous government, he instead ended up the chair of the Knesset’s powerful Defence and Foreign Relations committee. But in this role, he refused to rubberstamp a bill that would have exempted most Haredim from the draft. An angry Netanyahu ousted him from this role too, to try and appease his Haredi coalition partners.

The Erdan/Edelstein pitch is, basically, “we’re the old, sensible Likud”, a line that might have had more legs had the Likud primary chosen more nutty candidates. They haven’t promised to endorse Netanyahu or to boycott him either.

The party is not expected to pass the electoral threshold — the most recent poll showed them at just 0.5%.

Israel First - Sharren Haskel

Finally, a party led by a woman. Well. A “party”, anyway.

Sharren Haskel was a Likud Knesset member who broke away to join Gideon Saar’s faction in 2020. She was feted to join Erdan and Edelstein’s party, but instead she decided to launch her own thing. The launch event featured former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

Her party is promising to prevent a coalition with Arab parties, and she’s also refusing to sit with the left-wing Democrats. It has no hope of passing the electoral threshold.

Those are the new right-wing parties...

But there’s a few old right-wing parties worth a mention too:

Zehut (Identity) - Moshe Feiglin

Zehut’s been around a while. Moshe Feiglin was a former Likud MK (stop me if this story sounds familiar…) who used to be a regular right-wing challenger in the Likud leadership primary, starting out as a marginal candidate and but eventually winning 23% of the vote. Feiglin became something of a cult figure, running a far-right caucus inside Likud before eventually leaving and forming his own party.

Zehut has a dedicated following. The party had a moment when it was all about legalizing cannabis and it lured in some of the stoner vote. Then it reinvented itself as right-libertarian and brought in some AnCap types. During the Covid-19 pandemic it relaunched as an anti-vax party, and now its main issue is the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

Zehut has no chance of entering the Knesset on its own, but a poll on Monday gave the party 2% of the vote, a meaningful following.

Noam (for Israel) - Avi Maoz

Noam’s another small right-wing religious party devoted to culture war stuff. Like… they campaigned to block forms that say “parent one” and “parent two”, insisting on
”mother” and “father” and they’re trying to stamp out homosexuality in public life. That sort of thing. They’re more or less a one-man outfit, represented by Avi Maoz who got into the Knesset last time via a deal with another party.

Noam announced one new name for its party list: Yisca Hayimov, the sister of Shin Bet director David Zini. It also rebranded to “Noam for Israel”. For some reason.

Noam will not pass the electoral threshold alone.

Blue and White - Benny Gantz

It’s the last step in the lifecycle of so many once-proud opposition parties: the electoral death gasp. Benny Gantz’s Blue and White alliance was the largest party in the Knesset once, in 2019, but now he’s predicted to scrape less than one percent of the public vote.

Blue and White was a centrist party so arguably it doesn’t belong here at all. but Gantz seems to be making that same play for the right-of-centre vote this time around and is hoping for alliances and mergers on the right. For example, it was rumoured that former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked might join. She hasn’t, and the party’s failing.

And finally:

Religious Zionism - Bezalel Smotrich

Bezalel Smotrich is Israel’s Finance Minister, but his party was always on shaky ground. In the last election, he ran in a “technical bloc” with Itamar ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Noam.

Alone, his party was always pretty close to that 3.25% threshold. Since Ofer Winter’s People of Israel party entered the race last week, most polls show it drops below the magic number and out of the Knesset.

Oh, is that all?

Summing up where we are, here’s a summary of the small right-wing parties (updated since the RZ/Zehut merger):

This table is based on my own understanding and interpretations, and it has nuance. Some parties, for example, say they won’t sit in a coalition with party X. Others say they won’t sit in a coalition that depends on party X, meaning they’d accept them as long as the coalition had a majority without them. Some have been vague, or directly contradictory, on these questions too.

It’s very unlikely that all these parties are going to run in the election. Some may decide to sit it out. And some might merge, either with each other or with bigger parties.

Benjamin Netanyahu wants Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party to run on a joint list with Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power.

But Ben Gvir said no. Usually, in party mergers like this, the whole merged list gets less votes overall than the sum of its parts. Ben Gvir doesn’t want to basically donate seats to Smotrich for nothing. Netanyahu tried to get Ben Gvir’s Rabbis to tell him to do a deal, but (so far) to no avail.

Meanwhile, Smotrich is talking to Zehut’s Feiglin about a possible merger. A Channel 12 poll yesterday suggested that such a merged list would win 5 seats and knock Winter’s People of Israel under the threshold. UPDATE: Zehut and Religious Zionism signed on a joint electoral slate tonight (1 September).

Noam would probably end up joining the mix too, if this happened.

What does it all mean?

There’s been a lot of talk in Israel about how these new parties represent a “third bloc”, parties that are neither an automatic part of Netanyahu’s coalition or his automatic opponents. The third bloc is supposed to give voters a way to step outside the partisan to-Bibi-or-not-to-Bibi framing of Israeli elections and allow them to support a unity of mainstream Zionist parties that won’t give Haredim a draft exemption.

But the reality is quite different. Winter’s People of Israel says it’s explicitly a right-wing party that supports Netanyahu and wants to keep out the left. Almost all these smaller parties have ruled out a coalition that depends on the Democrats or Arab parties, which effectively locks them out of anything but a Netanyahu-led government.

These kinds of election promises don’t always survive contact with reality. A friend was excitedly supporting Winter, for example, insisting that he’d REALLY join an Eisenkot-led government in the end. But voting for a party because you think they’re lying is a terrible idea.

The problem for voters is that they don’t know what they’re getting.

• They don’t know if the small party they vote for will pass the threshold, or if their vote will end up being thrown away.

• If the party merges lists with another, they don’t know if their vote will help their party or the other one.

• If the party does enter the Knesset, in many cases they don’t really know who they’ll back for prime minister and what government they’ll support.

Of course, some of this is true for all parties. You never really know if a party will keep its promises. But most voters probably do have a strong preference for who they want to be prime minister. In this hyper-polarised time, voting for a “third bloc” party is a cop out, an abrogation of responsibility. For some voters, it’s a way to vote for Netanyahu while being able to say they didnt’ vote for Netanyahu. For others, it’s a vote for a fantasy government that can’t exist as long as the Bibi binary remains.

On 9 September, the parties must submit their final lists to the Central Elections Committee. In the coming week, the small parties will have to decide if they can agree to any mergers, withdraw or go it alone.

And there’s still time to launch another small right-wing party before then.

It’s the trend.

Future topics

What do you want me to cover in these weekly election newsletters? Any topics you’re interested to hear about or want explored?

I plan to do a piece on how polling works (and doesn’t) in Israel, and a piece on who might have a path to 61 seats and how.

Leave any other thoughts or suggestions in the comments.

Sign up to the Hat Tip, and please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription too.

The politics of a country has its intrinsic properties: culture, demographics, economics. Wine is not orange juice.

But politics, like all liquids, will flow to fit the shape of the container you put it in. Water, wine and beer alike, they’ll all be bottle-shaped in a bottle and cup-shaped in a cup. The structures matter.

This tortured metaphor is my way of justifying why this is going to be a kind of dry piece, because if you don’t understand Israel’s political system, you can’t really understand its politics.

Constitution

The State of Israel has no codified constitution.

It was supposed to. The country’s Declaration of Independence, on 15 May 1948, referred to “the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948”, three and a half months later.

It’s been 78 years.

The first thing that the provisional legislature did, a few days after declaring independence, was to enact a Law and Administration Ordinance that acted as a skeleton constitution. It also confirmed that all existing law remained in force.

That ‘existing law’ was already a bit of a mess. The land that became the State of Israel was, for centuries, a part of the Ottoman Empire and governed under Ottoman law.

After the First World War, the League of Nations gave the UK a mandate to administer the territory and made the British government “responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home (….) and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”

The British mandatory authorities kept Ottoman law in force but also decreed that questions not covered by existing Ottoman law should be handled “in conformity with the substance of the common law, and the doctrines of equity in force in England.”

So Israeli law is layered on top of both British Mandate common law and Ottoman law. Even today, the Rabbinic and Sharia courts decide on matters of marriage and divorce like they did under the Sultans, and Mandate-era public order laws are sometimes used against protesters.

No codified constitution doesn’t mean no written constitution. Israel’s constitution is contained in a series of Basic Laws that lay out how its Parliament (the Knesset), government and courts work. These are ‘special’ laws passed by the Knesset, but apart from a few key clauses they don’t have the protection from amendment that constitutions usually have.

System of government

Coming from a British mandate, Israel opted for a Westminster-style government. That means the people elect the parliament, and a Cabinet-style government emerges from within it. The Knesset has pass budgets or the government falls.

There was a brief attempt to try directly electing prime ministers in the 1990s, with the theory that a direct mandate would lead to a stronger and more stable government. In practice, the opposite occurred: freed from the need to vote for a party of government, voters backed more sectoral parties, giving the elected PM a headache in forming coalitions. The dual sources of legitimacy and power created a big mess, and the system was scrapped in the early 2000s.

So how does it work now?

First, the election

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, there are 120 Knesset members. That’s not very many for a country of 10 million people, especially given that there’s no second chamber and regional government is very weak and limited.

There aren’t really enough MKs (Members of Knesset), even with the newish so-called “Norwegian law” that allow some ministers to temporarily resign as MKs and be replaced by the next person on their party list. There aren’t enough to fill scrutiny committees, bill committees and do all the other stuff they need to do. But there’s also no political will to add more MKs. Everyone hates politicians and nobody wants more of them.

The Knesset’s elected in a general election every four years, unless there’s an early election — which there usually is.

As I said before, Israel used a closed-list proportional representation system. Parties submit a numbered list of (up to) 120 names and those people can become Knesset members based on their position in the list.

There’s a threshold of 3.25%. If a party gets fewer votes than that, then they get no seats and it counts for nothing.

Just to make life more interesting, two parties can sign “surplus sharing agreements”. If each party gets enough votes to win, say, ten and a half seats each, then they get to share those surplus votes and one of them gets an eleventh seat.

There’s a more thorough explainer from the Israel Democracy Institute, if you’re interested in the D’Hondt (aka the Bader-Ofer) method. I’m not nerdy enough to run my own counts.

10-12 parties expected to pass the the threshold this election, and another 3-4 look like they’ll drop below it unless they merge or withdraw. In a finely-balanced election, like this one’s predicted to be, one party falling below that 3.5% floor means a little reshuffle of the 4 seats that party would have taken in ways that could decide the victor.

The Knesset

Perhaps I’m spoiled by growing up in the Mother of Parliaments, but the Knesset is a particularly poor legislature. Its oversight functions are weak; its speaker is a government crony. Its committees often have no MKs attending apart from the chair and frequently descend into name-calling, screaming and someone being removed by Knesset security.

The Knesset plenum only meets three days a week, and on two of those days it only starts its sitting at 4pm. The government rarely, if ever, makes important announcements in the Knesset. Proceedings are usually only televised when there’s a fight or someone says something outrageous. Oral questions are uninformative, not the sharp back-and-forth of the UK Parliament.

Legislation is often rushed in marathon sittings at the end of a Knesset session, with multiple government bills getting waved through with often minimal proper scrutiny. The bills themselves tend to be pretty short, leaving the courts with plenty of interpretation to do.

But aside from legislating, one of the first things a newly-elected Knesset is supposed to do is to seat a new government after an election.

Choosing a prime minister

OK, so the election’s over and there’s a new 120 Knesset members. What happens now?

The rules are actually very simple. The Basic Law on Government says:

Once a new government must be formed, after consulting the representatives of the Parliamentary Groups, the President of the State shall assign the task of forming a government to one of the Knesset Members, who has agreed to do so.

Note here what it says and what it doesn’t. The president (a mostly honorary role in Israel chosen every 7 years by the Knesset) must talk to the party representatives and then assign one MK the task of forming a government.

• It doesn’t say the president must choose the leader of the bigger party.

• It doesn’t say that the president must choose the person who has the most recommendations, though in practice if an MK has a majority of recommendations, they’ve always been picked.

• It doesn’t say that he must pick a party leader. But also…

• It doesn’t say that he must pick the person most likely to form a government.

This final point was relevant during the government crisis of 2019-2020 when successive elections ended without a government being formed. The issue then was that a majority of Knesset members refused to back Netanyahu for PM due to his criminal charges, but a majority also refused to back any other party leader.

If the president had assigned the task of forming a government to another Likud MK, there’s a decent chance it would have succeeded. But he didn’t, presumably favouring the convention that only party leaders get the nod over any sense that he should pick the person most likely to form a government — and perhaps fearing the wrath of Netanyahu and his supporters.

Anyway, the nominee gets a few weeks to try and form a government.

If a nominee says that they have formed a government, then it goes to the Knesset for a vote of confidence. Critically, this is a regular vote which needs only a regular majority. It doesn’t need an absolute majority of 61 votes to seat an Israeli government, though it’s obviously harder for that government to operate if it doesn’t command a working majority in the Knesset.

If the nominee fails to form a government, the president does another round of consultations and can ask another candidate to have a go, or pass. The Knesset can also at this point nominate someone too. And if nobody succeeds then it leads to another election after 90 days.

Acting Government

Who’s in charge in the meantime?

The outgoing government stays on as an acting government. Everyone stays in office during the transition period which, even when things work, can be several weeks. If a government isn’t formed and there are new elections, the acting government stays on even longer.

Legally, there are some restrictions on what this acting government can do compared to a regular government, but they aren’t all that constraining. And there’s also some benefits too; ironically, it’s much easier for the prime minister to fire and replace ministers when there’s not a Knesset that has to sign off on it.

This also shifts the incentives a bit. After the current election, the opposition need to form a coalition to oust Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu just has to stop them and then he gets another election and several months more in office automatically.

The two races

This election, as is often the case, has two races going on at the same time.

The first is the electoral race.

Benjamin Netanyahu wants as many votes as possible for parties that will both:

1. support him to be prime minister

2. actually pass the electoral threshold and get seats.

That’s a challenge at the moment because there are several small right-wing parties hovering at or below the threshold. Netanyahu is trying to push parties that will back him into mergers to keep them in the game.

All the respected pollsters predict that the declared “Netanyahu bloc” parties will fall short of the 61 seats needed for a majority government. Most polls have these parties at 54 seats or lower. Mergers could perhaps get it as high as 56 but that looks like a ceiling.

The opposition parties want to get to 61 seats and form a government.

They could do it. Polls seem to mostly have them in the high 50s of seats but every now and again a poll predicts 60 seats for the anti-Netanyahu parties (not including the Arab parties, which is a whole other story). The polls here aren’t super accurate and an outright victory wouldn’t be a big surprise.

But it’d be more likely that they end up just short.

And that’s where the second race comes into play: the race to somehow get seat a government. The opposition thinks it might be able to get a government even if it’s below 61 seats — perhaps 60 with some abstentions. Hence all the talk about minority governments, support from the Arab parties and a possible attempt to grab the PM’s chair and prepare for another election.

Netanyahu, still prime minister in the meantime, is trying to work out which opposition MKs might defect, what jobs or rewards they could be given if they do, which parties might split away from their bloc and keep him in power anyway.

Failing that, he’s trying to ensure that the opposition can’t replace him. That’d trigger another election and keep him in power a little longer. The opposition has to win. Netanyahu just has to not lose.

And then we’ll have to do this all over again in 2027.

What should I write about?

What do you want me to cover in these weekly election newsletters? Any topics you’re interested to hear about or want explored? Leave your thoughts or suggestions in the comments.

Next week, I plan to write about the profusion of small ‘alternative’ right-wing parties that have popped up, who they are, what it means, and any mergers that might have already happened by then.

Sign up to the Hat Tip, and please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription too.

I like political parties, at least in theory if not in specific. Despite what the American founding fathers hoped, political parties are essential to a functioning democracy. People need to be able to come together and organise to promote their political interests, organise to support candidates for office who share their ideals and then work together in office to advance those goals while competing against others.

Parties suck, sometimes. Often, really. Political parties are always coalitions of interests, some broader and some narrower depending on how many parties the political system can support. The archetypal extreme example is America’s rigid, structurally and legally enforced two-party system, but actually the real extreme example, as a lecturer of mine at Bristol loved to remind us, was Tanzania. For many years, Tanzania was a formal one-party state but still allowed contested elections where two members of the ruling CCN party ran against each other and incumbents often lost.

On the other extreme is Israel. Israel’s unicameral parliament, the Knesset, has only 120 seats. That’s for historical reasons: according to tradition, the Great Assembly, that reconstituted the Israelite nation after the return from the Babylonian exile 2500 years ago had 120 members.

The Knesset is elected in a closed-list Proportional Representation system that encourages smaller parties. Originally the electoral threshold was just 1% of the vote, making one-seat parties possible.

Famously, in 1977, French fraudster Shmuel Flatto-Sharon fled to Israel and then ran for the Knesset to obtain parliamentary immunity so he couldn’t be extradited. He only submitted a single name on his list: his own. He won two seats anyway. It eventually emerged that he used bribery to win that election, and he served a short community service sentence.

The electoral threshold has been raised up over the years to 3.25%, which means four seats is the usual minimum (it’s technically possible to win just three seats if the maths work out, but nobody’s done it yet).

Even the 3.25% limit can still lead to plenty of fragmentation. The current Knesset had ten lists that passed the threshold, a lot of parties for 120 seats. But that doesn’t tell the full story either, because some of those were ‘technical’ lists, temporary electoral coalitions of smaller parties that split up once they were actually elected. The current Knesset, for example, has a one-man party despite all the limits: Noam, a homophobic ‘culture war’ party represented by Avi Maoz. Noam/Maoz was gifted a spot on the a joint list along with the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power parties.

Choosing candidates

Parties, love them or hate them, have to choose candidates somehow. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t really be political parties at all. In fact, as Andy Craig notes, the US doesn’t really have political parties in the conventional sense, but rather “two government-managed ballot labels”.

Michael Kinnucan puts it even more starkly: political parties, as we understand them in the rest of the world, are illegal in the United States, because the states themselves often demand that, say, Congressional candidates go through a government-run primary election to even appear on the ballot as a candidate of a party.

Money and Things

Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States

A longstanding concern on the US electoral left is the issue of “candidate accountability” – if we elect a left-wing candidate, how can we be sure that he or she will stay true to our politics while in office? It’s a big problem. One solution regularly proposed …

Read more

2 years ago · 19 likes · 7 comments · JW Mason

That’s made primaries in the US the battleground for different factions to exercise power. Republicans have seen the Tea Party and a MAGA insurgency knock out more moderate candidates; the Democrats are now facing something similar in the wave of Democratic Socialist of America-aligned candidates winning primaries.

Sometimes one party will stealthily campaign for an extreme candidate in the other party’s primary. Maureen Galindo, an antisemitic candidate running in the Democratic primary for a Congressional seat in Texas, got nearly a million dollars of backing from a conservative-funded Super-PAC, for example. She lost anyway.

You have to select candidates somehow. In the UK, there’s often tension between the local party activists and the national organisation when it comes to choosing parliamentary candidates, for example.

What makes the UK different from the US isn’t just the method of selection, though. It’s the frequency. Once someone wins a seat and becomes an MP, that’s usually it for selections. They’re the candidate automatically until they lose or stand down — unless they’re suspended from the party or piss off enough local activists.

That means that MPs aren’t constantly looking over their shoulder worrying about re-selection and can, instead, focus on re-election. They need to balance pleasing their constituents with the demands of their conscience and loyalty to the party leadership, but they mostly don’t have to cater too much to the more extreme party activists.

In the US, the short election cycle and automatic primaries mean that Members of Congress are constantly trying to be re-elected both in the primary and general elections. Most Congressional seats, though, are more or less safe on election day. Sitting House members often have more to fear from a primary than the general public.

How do they do it in Israel?

Back to Israel. Most Israeli party candidate lists these days are decided by either the party’s leader or a small committee. List candidates are numbered: if a party wins eight seats, the top eight become Knesset members. If it won ten, then the top ten names would get in.

That’d make it seem like the best political survival strategy for a Knesset member is to suck up to your party leader, and sometimes that’s right. But in Israel’s unstable electoral landscape, sometimes you can’t count on your party surviving into the next election. Often, the smarter play is to suck up to some other party’s leader, causing your own party trouble in return for a cushy spot on the other party’s list. There are rules designed to prevent this sort of thing, but they’re easily sidestepped.

Of course, this tactic only works if you’re pretty sure the other party’s going to have a decent showing.

Which brings us to Likud, generally a safe bet as a party to defect to.

The Likud primary

Likud’s one of the few parties left in Israel that still has primary elections to select its candidates. So does the Democrats, the newish party formed by the merger of the Labor and Meretz parties.

These parties also elect their leaders via a membership election… in theory. Likud cancelled its leadership election this time because nobody decided to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Knesset list primary is open to Likud members, which means any adult citizen who signs up online and pays the $25 membership fee.

Since the 1990s, Likud has become Israel’s de facto party of government. Likud has had four leaders in its history and all of them became prime minister. It’s had periods out of power, most notably when sitting Likud prime minister Ariel Sharon founded a breakaway party in 2005 after the unilateral Israeli disengagement from Gaza, but it’s always come back.

That’s made the internal Likud primary a place where special interests, bloc votes and dealmakers play. Trade unions, professional associations and municipalities encourage their workers to join Likud and then operate these blocs to support candidates that serve their interest, often promoting protectionism and blocking measures that could reduce the cost of living.

In the late 2000s, after the Gaza disengagement, the settler movement joined Likud to promote ideologically-aligned candidates. This year, it was Haredim signing up for Likud en masse and voting for potential MKs who’d be willing to exempt Haredim from the military draft, even though they’ll all vote for Haredi parties in the general election.

Likud tolerates this sort of thing as long as the entryist factions support Netanyahu. A neo-liberal faction, the New Likudniks, was expelled from the party in 2019 for the crime of being too moderate.

Not every Likud member is part of an organised bloc. There are plenty of independent members, usually supporters of Netanyahu and often pretty hardcore right-populists. And so another way of winning the Likud primary is to cater to them.

And so Likud has seen a run of, erm, “populist” candidates who are in the media every other day for insulting someone, saying something racist, or both. This current Knesset had several including Shlomo Karhi (the Communications Minister), May Golan (the Social Equality Minister!) and Tally Gotliv. Gotliv, a qualified lawyer, would often sit in the audience of Netanyahu’s criminal trial and heckle the judges until she was removed. Anyone can be a bit populist in primary season, though, and previously-moderate Likud MKs push headline-grabbing populist policies or stunts in the runup to a primary.

Likud has better and worse elections. Sometimes being number 26 on the Likud list looks like a very safe bet to get elected, and sometimes it looks marginal or a very likely loss. But there’s no mechanical difference between being tenth on the list vs being second. Still, the higher a candidate comes, the more popular they were, and that comes with a certain measure of respect and an expectation of a good ministerial job down the line.

Israel Katz, the current Minister of Defence, was never going to lose the Likud primary, but that didn’t stop him pulling a series of controversial headline-grabbing moves that were widely seen as an attempt to improve his list position.

All of this is the backdrop to why Likud has been slowly taking away power from its primary elections and giving more power to, yup, Benjamin Netanyahu in a supposed attempt to keep the party list more moderate and electable. This year, Netanyahu has the right to appoint nine candidates directly to the Likud list, seven of which are in the top 20: positions 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 15 and 18 are his to gift, while he of course holds the top slot for himself.

Last week, in an effort to rein in Katz and stop the stupid stunts, Netanyahu gave him one of the appointed slots, alongside Foreign Minister Gidon Saar and party power broker Haim Katz (no relation).

The results

The actual primary vote happened on Monday, with a relatively low turnout at 53%, 76,068 voters. For comparison, Israel’s Democrats party had 86% participation with 97,000 voting.

After all the fuss and fury, the results were kind of boring. No newcomers won any slots in the top 25 in an election where Likud is mostly polling in the low 20s (the only new name, celeb entrepreneur Oren Dobronsky, was one of Netanyahu’s direct appointments). Firebrand Tally Gotliv, who was tipped to do well with populist votes, ended up in 20th place.

Top, perhaps surprisingly, was Eli Cohen, relatively unknown despite being the former Foreign Minister. Cohen won the old-fashioned way, spending months travelling the country, attending local party meetings and making friends with activists to build a personal following. Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana and Justice Minister Yariv Levin came next.

Notably, only three women made it into the top 25, and one of those, Gila Gamaliel, is in a very uncertain 25th place.

What does it mean?

This whole dance is about the underlying dynamic of this coming election. The current coalition of right wing and religious Jewish parties is polling (mostly) at around 47-53 seats, well short of the 61 needed for a majority government.

Netanyahu can afford to lose votes to parties on his right. It’s worth his while to moderate the Likud list in the hope of winning some centre-right voters away from opposition parties, even if it costs Likud overall because a vote for Ben Gvir is still a vote to keep Netanyahu in office.

Overall, Netanyahu got about the most he could reasonably get from this primary. The firebrands either lost or performed poorly, and the current Knesset members did well enough to limit internal discontent. It’s not a very exciting list, though, and post-primary polls don’t show any gains for Likud.

Netanyahu will get another couple of bites of the cherry when he fills the three empty reserved slots. But there’s only three, and he’s considering giving one to Avi Dichter, a current minister with a lot of security experience who did poorly in the primary. The other two probably have to go to women, given the list’s terrible gender balance. It’s hard to think of any appointment, male or female, that could meaningfully reshape the election at this point.

Other parties

With Likud’s list almost closed, attention turns to two other two major parties. Beyachad (“together”), the merger between Yair Lapid’s well-established Yesh Atid faction and Naftali Bennett’s party, has announced a few names, mostly centrist types with backgrounds in the civil service and local government in addition to the Yesh Atid old hands.

Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party is also pulling in both former Knesset members from other parties, technocrats, businesspeople and possibly Shir Siegel, the daughter of two former Gaza hostages. Another hostage family member, Sharon Sharabi, brother of Eli Sharabi, is on Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu slate…

This is all getting a bit dense and you’re probably not following all the names unless you already know plenty about Israeli politics. The bottom line is that those other parties don’t have primaries. We’ll find out their lists at the September 9 deadline, and they can do what they like so perhaps they’ll announce some high-profile joiners before then too.

Closed-list PR means Israel’s Knesset members have no personal mandate. Likud voters don’t don’t know if their vote’s helping to elect number 22 on the list, who perhaps they like, or number 23, who perhaps they hate — or someone else entirely. It’s not a great electoral system because it puts so much real power into whoever controls the party lists.

Primaries tend to make it worse. Whether it’s pandering to powerful vote-bundlers on the Likud central committee or courting populist votes with stupid stunts, Likud’s primary has been a source of bad behaviour and bad candidates for many electoral cycles, promoting both cronyism and extremism. This year’s list isn’t any worse than previous years, but it’s already the culmination of years of these dynamics, as talented Knesset members are driven out and new talent has no space to emerge.

You’ve got to select candidates somehow.

But there must be a better way than this.

Afterword

In the ten weeks until the election, I plan to write a weekly Hat Tip on an Israeli election topic: the politics, the parties, the polls and some of the other dynamics at play.

Sign up to the Hat Tip, and please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription too.

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has completed its four-year term, something that very rarely happens — the only other time in the last 50 years was in 1988 — and it’s been an astonishingly turbulent four years. Briefly ousted, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in an election campaign where his flagship policy was “free childcare for under-3s”. He built a coalition entirely from parties to his own right and the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) parties.

Then the Likud justice minister, Yariv Levin, launched a controversial “judicial reform” programme to heavily curtail the powers of the judiciary and civil service. The programme defined the first nine months of the Netanyahu government’s tenure, led to huge internal protests and warnings from the security heads that the country’s enemies were watching.

And then, on 7 October 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 people into Gaza.

The resultant war killed tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians, destroyed most of Gaza’s buildings, and left Israel internationally isolated and historically unpopular. It did, eventually, bring home most of the hostages, alongside pressure from Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But it didn’t achieve its stated aim of removing Hamas as the government of Gaza. Hamas still rules the rubble, and the Netanyahu government spent years refusing to consider any alternative.

Everyone in power on 7 October has gone: the generals, the intelligence heads, the defence minister. Everyone except Benjamin Netanyahu, architect of the appeasement strategy that kept Hamas in power in Gaza in return for relative ‘quiet’.

Two more wars followed, both brief and seemingly decisive. Exploding pagers and leadership assassinations opened up a two-month campaign in Lebanon that seemed to leave Hezbollah deterred. A dramatic strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, with eventual US participation, seemed to be another strategic victory. For a few months, Netanyahu was riding high, maybe believing he could still somehow regain his domestic popularity and decisively win the next election.

But then nemesis followed hubris: the 2026 US/Israel war against Iran was an act of strategic self-sabotage, strengthening Iran and exposing Hezbollah’s apparent defeat as a mirage. Iran still seems to have much of its ballistic missile stock intact, it still has its stash of enriched uranium and now it appears to control the Strait of Hormuz with tacit US permission.

With yet another Lebanon war and still occupying half of Gaza, Israel’s conscript and reservist military is at breaking point. But the government has spent most of its domestic political capital desperately trying to exempt the largest-growing pool of potential conscripts, Haredi youths, from the draft. More money, more legal status, even a law to stop the police arresting Haredi draft dodgers; all incredibly unpopular but demanded by Netanyahu’s Haredi partners and willingly paid by his coalition.

And that’s the backdrop to this election.

In Israel, you don’t have to ‘win’ an election to be prime minister, and you certainly don’t have to win to stay prime minister if you already occupy the office. As long as you can cobble together a coalition of 61 Knesset members, that’s enough to get you over the line. Despite Netanyahu’s precarious position, he has any number of routes to stay in power.

That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy.

This time his main challenger is former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. Eisenkot emerged from a crowded field of opposition politicians to become the de facto leader of the anti-Netanyahu camp.

I wrote an introductory profile of Eisenkot for the Spectator explaining some of the racial and class dynamics at play:

Despite his Germanic-sounding surname, Eisenkot is Mizrachi, the son of working-class Moroccan immigrants; a marked contrast from Netanyahu, the nepo-baby son of a politically-connected Ashkenazi college professor. Eisenkot joined the traditionally Mizrachi Golani Brigade when he was drafted into the IDF, where he rose through the ranks (According to Max Hastings, a young Netanyahu once joked that Golani was “OK as long as they’re led by white officers.” Netanyahu denies this)

OK, that’s the story so far, in a very abridged fashion. What’s next?

Election coverage

In the ten weeks until the election, I plan to write a weekly Hat Tip on an Israeli election topic: the politics, the parties, the polls and some of the other dynamics at play.

The first newsletter will be about the party primaries.

Well, technically, the first one was this one. But the next one, also due out this week, will be look at the primaries as Likud members vote in their party’s internal election today.

Regular readers or followers of my content will know that I am no fan of the current Israeli government. I consistently criticised the Gaza war as far too brutal, too indiscriminate, too deadly while also lacking any real strategy. I opposed the pointless adventurism of this latest Iran fiasco, believe that the only stable solution involves self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians, and hope that Netanyahu loses.

That won’t be enough for some people, but so be it.

I don’t want to write just horse-race coverage, but ultimately elections are fundamentally about who’s winning, who’s losing, who’s convincing and who's failing. Reporting that passes no moral judgments is empty, but reporting that centres them often fails in its basic duty to report. If I talk glibly about the Itamar Ben Gvir’s far right party, that doesn’t mean I’m treating it just the same as the more centrist parties, it just means the election itself is.

I’m going to be trying to keep up a better pace of posting here over the next few months, hopefully building the Hat Tip back into a publication that has something to say, and the election is a good place to start.

That means it’s also a good time to sign up. Click here to subscribe:

It’s hard not to. We had years of Obama “scandals”. There was the famous contrived panic over him wearing a tan suit.

Or remember that slip of the tongue where he started he’d visited 50 states on the campaign but corrected mid-stream to 47, ended up flubbing the line into “57 states”? That was EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO and US conservatives are still talking about it as a sign that Obama was either a moron or a secret Islamic agent.

Meanwhile, when Donald Trump (or a staffer) prematurely posted a tweet about bad press coverage, mistyping “coverage” as the now-infamous “covfefe”, we were treated to endless stories about the real meaning of the mysterious new word.

Or compare the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency. Every slip-up, misspeaking or forgotten name was treated as a major international news story, a sign that Biden was suffering from hidden severe dementia, like when he called Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi the president of Mexico (rather than Egypt).

Trump’s increasing incoherence creates a tension when covering his remarks. His speeches are so long and meandering that they’re rarely broadcast in full. Even when he garbles the soundbites, the media often clears it up in post-production. He shares unhinged rants online, but only on his own Truth Social platform where nobody really sees them (and this is a digression, but it’s wild that the most important US government announcements are made on a social media platform owned by the President and nobody even treats this as a scandal).

But it’s hard to compare like for like. Perhaps Trump’s just lucky, or talented, good at saying dumb things that the media won’t care about, while Biden’s gaffes were more newsworthy. It’s not like they’ve ever made the exact same error, right?

Right?

A Tale of Two NATO Summits

In July 2024, President Joe Biden hosted in the annual NATO summit in Washington DC. On the final day, July 11, Biden was on stage with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce a defence compact. Introducing Zelenskyy, Biden said:

As I’ve said before, Russia will not prevail in this war. Ukraine will prevail in this war. And we will stand with them every single step of the way. That’s what the compact says loudly and clearly.

And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin…

Biden immediately noticed his rather awkward error and tried to roll back mid-sentence:

…President Putin—he’s going to beat President Putin—President Zelenskyy. [Laughter]

I’m so focused on beating Putin, we’ve got to worry about it. Anyway, Mr. President.

It was an awkward moment that became a major international story, dominating the day’s coverage of the summit. The BBC’s Chris Mason described the reaction in the room:

There were audible gasps in the press room as the words were uttered. Reporters from all over the world were dumbstruck at what they had just heard.

The Reuters wire service ran the slip as a full story, which guaranteed broad media pickup of the syndicated content. Centre-left publications like the Guardian also felt it was newsworthy as well as, of course, all the US networks.

Other world leaders at the NATO summit were asked about Biden’s fitness after the Putin remark. Zelenskyy was forced to defend Biden. An NBC roundup of the coverage noted:

In Asia, all five major Japanese TV networks reported on Biden’s mistake, as did newspapers in Singapore, South Korea, India, Hong Kong and China.

China’s hawkish Global Times newspaper ran a story headlined: “Biden’s statement of ‘Ukrainian President Putin’ worries foreign media.” It was also a top search topic on China’s X-like social media platform Weibo.

News outlets in Saudi Arabia and Egypt also noted the slipup, and Qatari network Al Jazeera said, “Biden’s gaffes mount and calls for his withdrawal increase.”

Ten days after the incident, Joe Biden withdrew as the Democratic candidate for the 2024 presidential race, citing his age.

Almost exactly two years later — and a few days ago, last Wednesday — President President Donald Trump was in Ankara, Turkey for the annual NATO summit. Sitting on the stage at a joint news conference with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump gestured towards Zelenskyy and said:

“You have a question for President Putin, please?”

The assembled press chuckled for a few seconds, and Trump, unwilling to admit a mistake, continued

“Do you have a question for President Putin — not Zelenskyy, Putin? What would you like to ask him? Because I’m going to ask him that question.”

Same conference.

Same time of year.

Same Ukrainian president.

Same gaffe, calling him by the name of the same enemy leader.

Same media reaction?

Well…. no.

This time there was no Reuters story. In fact, the Reuters report of the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting doesn’t mention the verbal slip at all. I can’t find any Guardian report either. Ditto CNN, Axios, NBC and most of the other major news outlets that treated Biden’s identical slip a global and potentially presidency-ending story.

A few outlets made Trump’s remarks a story, like Forbes, Newsweek and the Mirror. These pieces also highlighted a few other, erm, odd remarks Trump made at the summit, most notably claiming that the US Navy was attacked by the “Islamic Republic of Japan”. Nobody corrected Trump, and the mistake spawned a bunch of memes and mockery online but also relatively modest traditional media coverage.

Trump also referred to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as the “JCPOC”, though it wasn’t completely clear if that was a mistake or a racist joke.

Oh, and he insisted he was “number one on Tic-Tac”, messing up the name of Tiktok while also lying egregiously about his popularity on the platform.

But even all these together just merited some roundup articles, not the breathless international crisis coverage that Biden’s remarks garnered.

Of course, the two Putin gaffes aren’t really identical. There’s always context; in Biden’s case, the context was the disastrous debate he’d just had with Trump and the pressure on him to drop out of the presidential race as he defended his mental fitness against critics. In that context, every flub was being hyper-scrutinised.

But… well, that’s also kind of true of Trump, who obsessively cites his ‘aced’ cognitive tests to preempt critics that wonder about his age and mental fitness. Trump’s over 80, and his mental and physical health are the subject of intense speculation. OK, he’s not running again, but he’s supposed to be in office for another two and a half years. In some ways, that should be more of a story than Biden, who looked like he was going to lose.

Politics on Easy Mode

These days, being on the right has become playing politics on easy mode, partly because the right has abandoned almost all moral claims, effectively immunizing themselves against claims of hypocrisy. “We’re supposed to be racists and abusers, so it’s dog-bites man. But those lefties and liberals, they say they’re against that stuff so when they do it, its wrong and it’s newsworthy”.

So having far-right tattoos and past accusations of sexual assault is fine if you’re a Republican. You can be Secretary of Defense.. or War, if you prefer. And that doesn’t mean you can’t attack the Democrats for nominating a man with far-right tattoos and past accusations of sexual assault. Why should it? We’re the baddies, but they’re supposed to be better!

This accounts, I think, for a certain amount of unbalanced media coverage against the left. A generation ago, it was the opposite, when conservative politicians were preaching “family values” but getting caught with their pants down every couple of weeks. But that was then. The 21st century cultural right doesn’t have any such morals to betray.

It’s not hypocrisy, but maybe there’s something similar going on here. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were “supposed to be” normal presidents, respected on the world stage, expected to act with honesty, wisdom and integrity. They’re judged by the rightly high standards of the job.

Donald Trump isn’t. He’s not really expected to be up to the job, so he’s graded on a scale, judged as “clown president” who’s had a good day whenever he hasn’t directly and personally caused a crisis or disaster.

Trump got Zelenskyy’s name wrong? Well, it’s good he tried! He claimed to be the biggest account on Tiktok? At least this morning he isn’t claiming to have created the tides or building a tower to the moon, right? The reflecting pool is green and now he’s arresting anyone who touched it for sabotage? At least he didn’t demolish the Lincoln Memorial and blame it on Antifa. Yet.

It’s not news that he’s not up to the job because… well, because it’s not actually news that he’s not up to the job!

And that means Trump has had, and still has, a fundamentally positive media environment, even among outlets that openly hate him.

I think this really began in 2015 when Ryan Grim and Danny Shea at the Huffington Post decided that the Trump campaign would be covered in the Entertainment section and not as a political story. They wrote:

“After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”

Trump’s been President twice now, and much of the media still follows this policy to some degree, through ICE raids, pandemics and foreign wars. Isn’t it so entertaining? Remember not to take him too seriously, though.

We don’t get to do double-blind controlled political or media experiments. It’s unusual to see the exact same incident under two different presidents and see if our intuitions about coverage are accurate.

This time, we did. Same gaffe, same venue, same context. The only real change was the identity of the president. And that made all the difference.

The photo seems to show Allen, sitting at home, drinking something from a silver can. But @the_maga_report was most interested in his shirt:

Despite coming from a small account with no sourcing, the photograph went viral, helped along by Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel with its 3.5 million followers:

And now the photo and claim is everywhere, posted as a reply by people ‘just asking questions’ in response to basically anyone talking about the shooting. I’ve seen lots of speculation that Allen was detained shirtless because the authorities were trying to hide the shirt, for example.

Is the image genuine?

I don’t know for sure, but it’s very likely to be fake.

There are no foolproof signs of AI generation or manipulation; no SynthId or six-fingered hands (though that rarely happens anymore). Some “AI detectors” said it was real, and some said it was generated, but all that proves is that AI detectors are useless crap —which we knew already.

There are a few things that do suggest AI but are ambiguous, like the yellowed ‘piss filter’ and a few minor off details, e.g.:

The New York Post wrote up more of these inconsistencies, though I don’t find them terribly convincing on their own.

One possible clue here is the texture. The full-sized image has a sort of grainy, spackled, impressionist effect to it that resembles a digital camera in very low light.

This isn’t a known AI sign. Or, to be more accurate, it wasn’t until last week, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT Image 2, a new image generation model. Users have reported that ChatGPT Image 2 seems to generate grainy, grimy images so often that some suspect it’s a stealth form of watermarking. So that’s a good hint that this might be fake but generated using a newer, less familiar tool.

Much more suspicious, though, is the total lack of provenance. In all the posts about this supposed “Instagram image”, nobody knows the username of the supposedly-suspended Instagram account it was taken from. Nobody has shared other posts from the account or taken any screenshots. We’re supposed to rely on the word of “the Maga Report” that this image was really on Allen’s Instagram.

The Maga Report

So who is @the_maga_report? The Maga Report is a small X/Twitter account. It has 500 followers now but I suspect a lot of those only started after its recent “scoop”.

What does it post? Despite the name, it’s not pro-Trump. In fact, it seems to be part of the Candace Owens/Tucker Carlson/Jake Shields nexus that believes Trump is being controlled by the Jews and Israel. Here’s a couple of The Maga Report’s posts from just the last week:

Talmudic Jews, Israel did 9/11, Jews killed Charlie Kirk, Jews are Khazars and abusers and betrayers and… well, you get the idea.

Interestingly, the account seems to have only pivoted to MAGA content in the last year or so, perhaps since the Charlie Kirk assassination. The account only changed its name to the MAGA Report in September 2025, and before that shared left-leaning content on Israel/Palestine, replied often to Hassan Piker and other Young Turks. It also commonly created and shared AI-generated images two years ago when they were still pretty new.

Summing up: the original source for the Cole Allen IDF shirt claim and image seems to be an obscure Twitter account which, despite being called “the MAGA Report”, is actually a former left-winger who was radicalised into right-wing antisemitism via Candace Owens, Jake Shields etc and who has a documented interest in making AI fakes. I think we can pretty confidently say we have the true origin of the IDF shirt image.

The impact of a fake

So what if it had been real? Anyone can buy an IDF-branded T-shirt or have got one from a thrift store.

Whoever runs the MAGA Report seems to have created the image to suggest that the shooting was a hoax and that Trump was in on it. In that worldview, Trump is an Israeli agent and the IDF generated a false flag attack to create sympathy for their guy.

This was cooked up by someone on the antisemitic far right. The exact same theory, though, has found equally fertile soil among even the liberal centre-left.

America has become heavily conspiracy-brained, and every violent incident is followed by its political tribes arguing that the assailant was actually one of “them”, not one of “us”. Despite Cole Allen leaving a note inaccurately described as a “manifesto” that touches on his motivations, social media is full of left-of-centre people insisting that he must actually be a far right assassin or IDF plant, as proven by his shirt.

On the other side, MAGA types are split between the antisemitic wing that says it’s an Israeli-Jewish plot to threaten Trump, a warning shot, and the rest who say it’s all the fault of the media, the Democrats and Bluesky.

Generative AI is getting better and faster. Every incident, every news story now has dozens of instantly-generated fake pictures trying to support different narratives or promote conspiracy theories. What can we do?

• Focus less on the images themselves. Sometimes they’ll have clues and inconsistencies, particularly if the image is in a public place, but you can’t count on it. More definitive is provenance: where did this image or video first come from? Who shared it and how did they get it? Can you check the source yourself?

• Don’t trust AI tester apps or other LLMs to spot fakes. They don’t work. The exception is SynthID; if Gemini tells you an image has a SynthID watermark, then it was at least edited, if not fully generated, by Gemini’s tools.

• Be sceptical. It’s always the “question everything, it’s a conspiracy” types that are the most credulous. Take a few seconds to think and check before sharing things that conform to your prior beliefs.

Antisemitism is a liquid: it crosses political boundaries and takes the shape of the container it fills. This particular fake was created by a far-right antisemite who started out their journey on the left. The image was spread by, among others, the Russian government, and was adopted by people on the centre-left to promote the same conspiracy theory.

I’m writing a book about antisemitism on the contemporary Right, in part because left-wing antisemitism has been extensively studied in recent decades but right-wing antisemitism has been, in a sense, taken for granted.

But even as I write, I need to remember the distinction between right-wing and left-wing antisemitism is kind of arbitrary. Antisemitism pre-dates the distinction between left and right and it jumps back and forward with ease. Only vigilance can keep it in check.

This isn’t a deep analysis or prediction, but just a straightforward restatement of what we all should know: The polls say it’s close. That doesn’t mean it IS close, but it means we don’t know any better.

1. The polls say that the election is too close to call

Pennsylvania is the most likely state to be the ‘tipping point’, the state that pushes either Harris or Trump over the 270 electoral vote threshold and wins them the election. Here’s the final weighted poll average from FiveThirtyEight: a Harris lead of 0.2%.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver’s weighted polling average, which uses different polls and weightings, makes it a Trump lead. By 0.1%.

Both of these major electoral modelling shops say that Pennsylvania is basically a tie. And that pattern is replicated throughout the traditional swing states: Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan are all states where the polling averages have a 1% lead or lower for one of the candidates. These states plus Pennsylvania represent 82 electoral college votes.

If the polls are correct, the election is too close to call.

2. The models say it’s too close to call

Election models are a bit more than just polls. They combine weighted poll data with trends, objective stuff like economic data, incumbency bonuses and other variables to try and predict who will

Nate Silver’s model, for example, has remained in the 60-40 region for almost the entire time since Kamala Harris became Democratic candidate in late July with no candidate really pulling solidly ahead.

Now, you’d rather have a 60% chance to win than a 50% chance, but there isn’t THAT much in it. To put it in Dungeons and Dragons terms, a 60% chance is a DC12 check with no modifiers. A 50% chance is a DC10. You’d rather take the DC12, but either way, you’re not going to be very surprised if you roll an 8 and fall in a pit trap.

This morning, Silver ran his model for the final time and it came out with, more or less, exactly 50-50.

So the polls say it’s very close in the swing states, and the models say (unsurprisingly) that the chance of either candidate winning is a toss-up. So we should expect a close election, right?

3. None of this means the election will actually be close

In 2020, Joe Biden was the prohibitive favorite to win, with polls giving him a solid majority in the Rust Belt states and models predicting he had a 90% chance of being the next president.

And he did win, of course, but only barely. Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were much narrower than expected. The polls were wrong, the models that relied on the polls were wrong, and an apparent blowout turned into a narrow victory.

Something similar happened in 2016. The polls were actually not as inaccurate as they were in 2020, but they were still wrong, and many of the popular election models predicted that Hillary Clinton was massively likely to win.

2016’s failures got a lot more attention than 2020’s, because the polls and models were predicting the wrong candidate, but in pure numerical terms, 2020 was worse — despite all the hand-wringing about weighting for education, rural versus urban etc.

If Kamala Harris outperforms her polls by 4 points, amounting to a 2-point polling error, then she wins all the battleground states and possibly Iowa.

If, on the other hand, Trump is being underestimated by just one point, he comfortably sweeps the battlegrounds himself.

So it might not be close at all by Wednesday morning. There’s a fairly decent chance that we’ll know who the next president is by then.

4. The polls could also be right!

On the other hand, the polls could be telling us the truth this time. Perhaps the lessons of 2016 didn’t apply to 2020 because of the weirdness of the pandemic, but they’ll work this time? After all, the polls were pretty accurate in the 2022 midterms.

If so, we could be looking at several days or more before the final election result is known, with the rust belt being decided by just a few thousand votes in each state.

Lengthy recounts and legal action over particular batches of ballots would be almost inevitable in this case, and unlike 2020, they could actually stand a chance of altering the result. It would be a hellish period of global uncertainty.

5. Trump supporters think they’ve won already

In 2020, nearly every poll and piece of evidence was pointing to a huge Biden victory, but the true MAGA believers were incredibly confident.

Of course Trump would win. He said he would win and he’s always right. He’s too smart to lose. The polls are all fake and when Trump is re-elected, it’s going to be AWESOME.

Every piece of news just confirmed their belief. A poll showing the gap is narrowing? Great news for Trump! A bad day in the press? Keeps him in the news! A poll showing Trump losing by a lot? That will just make it even sweeter when he wins and the Libs cry!

It was this absolute confidence, stoked constantly by Trump himself, that ultimately led to the January 6, 2021 storming of Congress to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

This time, it’s different. That hardcore group is less confident for two reasons that are really the same reason:

1. Trump lost in 2020, so even absolute confidence has its limits. Maybe “the Dems will steal it again”.

2. Trump lost in 2020, so he can’t use the apparatus of the executive to keep himself in power.

But the wider group of soft MAGA types are, justifiably, more confident than they were in 2020. The polls show it’s even, and for much of the race Trump had small but meaningful leads in key states. The popular vote polling is as close as it’s ever been. For two elections running, polls understated Trump, so maybe they’ll do it again. And, finally, there was just a Trumpy media vibe for the last few weeks.

So if Trump does lose (and we don’t know if he wins or loses yet), and comes out and claims he woz robbed by fraud… well, there will be some people to whom that sounds plausible, even if they didn’t believe him last time.

I don’t know where that ends yet. There are too many variables, too many hypotheticals, too many moving pieces. But this is what I’m watching.

This coming election is an odd one, where a Labour victory seems pre-ordained and the main discussion is whether it will be ‘only’ a landslide or a complete wipeout of the Conservative Party. I was one of a group of commentators that wrote about this back in early 2023 and I STILL don’t think it’s quite begun to sink in what happens if the Tories drop below 100 seats.

But I thought we could still use a little comic relief.

The parties contesting the 2024 election, though, aren’t quite as whacky and funny as they were in 2015. There’s no Birthday Party, Roman Party, Children of the Atom or 3. Al-Zebabist Nation of OOOG. I’m not sure whether this is a reflection of the times, or perhaps a decision by unconventional candidates to go it alone as independents instead of forming parties.

Still, here’s my selection of interesting small parties standing candidates in the general election.

A Blue Revolution

This party claims to be an “organisation whose aim is to bring an end to party politics”. Though it doesn’t say so explicitly, it seems to be a Marxist party because it keeps citing Marx all the time in its manifesto and its analysis is thoroughly Marxist too. It also wants to ban whipping — the party political kind. I think.

The founder, candidate and possibly sole activist, Mike Gilbert, spoke to the Shropshire Star in 2017 about his policies:

Policies are based on the idea that “nothing is given or received unless it is contracted for, freely chosen and consented to” – for example, parents would be required to sign a contract committing to being responsible for the child they are having before birth.

No word on what happens if they refuse to sign.

The Confelicity party

Just one of many local-issue parties, this one is based in Southend. But it has such a lovely name.

Confelicity.

Confelicity is the opposite of schadenfreude; it’s taking delight in another’s happiness. And it’s feels good to say too, like a hug in your mouth.

Confelicity.

Count Binface Party

Count Binface is challenging Rishi Sunak in his constituency of Richmond and Northallerton.

There’s a convoluted history here. Originally, Lord Buckethead was a Darth Vader parody from a 1984 film “Hyperspace”. In the 1987 election, comedian Mike Lee ran against Margaret Thatcher as Lord Buckethead. He did the same against John Major in 1992.

Jonathan Harvey revived Lord Buckethead in 2017 to fight Theresa May, but unlike Lee, he didn’t have the rights to the character and was forced to reinvent himself as the new, improved Count Binface in 2019 where he contested Boris Johnson’s seat.

(The rights-holders to Lord Buckethead allowed someone else to wear the bucket that year as a Monster Raving Loony candidate, resulting in both Binhead and Bucketface standing in Uxbridge. Boris won).

Binface’s policies include reintroducing Ceefax, inviting European countries to join the UK rather than the other way round, price-capped croissants and mandatory national service for former prime ministers.

The English Constitution Party

This outfit, which is standing four candidates, is an English nationalist campaign group whose leader is known as “Daddy Dragon”, a former QAnon promoter who’s recently taken to ranting about Jews and Jesuits on Twittert.

His party are sovereign citizen types who believe an independent England would restore ‘common law’ and make everyone immune from taxes, and they’re best known for trying to disrupt the coronation of Charles III with eggs and whistles.

The Fairer Voting Party

A one-man show promoting an, erm, eclectic idea of electoral reform: the top two candidates in each constituency should both become MPs, and their Commons votes will be weighted proportionally to the number of actual votes they received. Also there will be mandatory ‘independents’ elected, somehow. This is supposed to Fix Everything. Hmm.

The Freedom Alliance

A party born out of opposing COVID restrictions, their manifesto is a dully familiar list of global control conspiracy theories. They’re against 15 minute cities, central bank digital currencies, the Great Reset, Net Zero, ULEZ, social credit scores and so on.

Their strongest asset: a really good logo. See how it combines the letters F and A into a dove with an olive branch? A bit of a waste, really.

New Open Non-Political Organised Leadership (NONPOL)

A lot of these small parties are ‘anti-politics’ and this one puts it right in the title. But they also have a pretty broad manifesto that, while hard to characterise, is certainly ‘political’ and fits more comfortably on the Right of the political spectrum. They want to leave NATO, dump Ukraine, make the tax system regressive, make prisons into labour camps, scrap Net Zero… but they also say climate change is catastrophic, just inevitable so why waste time fighting it. Instead we should all flee to space. Quickly.

Psychedelic Movement

With four candidates standing in the 2024 election, the Psychedelic Movement wants to legalise psychedelic drugs, of course. It also wants to incorporate them into Church ceremonies.

But there’s a surprising right-wing streak in the party’s manifesto, too. Their Southend candidate wants to “bring back exile” as a punishment and in the 2022 by-election caused by the murder of David Amess MP, their materials had a strong anti-Islam bent, praising Tommy Robinson and Hatun Tash and they seem to use the racist Gab platform as their main social media. Not, perhaps, quite the Peace and Love you’d expect from the party of LSD and shrooms.

Rejoin EU

This party wants to (wait for it….) rejoin the European Union. There are 26 Rejoin EU candidates standing in the 2024 election, mostly in London constituencies, making them one of the larger ‘small’ parties. Only three of their 26 candidates are women, though.

Save Us Now

Are you mostly worried about 5G mobile networks killing us all? if so, you’re probably a conspiracy theorist and generally wracked with worry about the modern world. But at least there’s a political party just for you! Save Us Now (SUN, geddit?) is a one-man party run by Mark Steele, who believes that mobile phone networks are part of some nefarious plot to microwave us all. Of course, he also thinks 5G caused Covid and that vaccines are 5G boosters or transmitters or something.

The Common People

The website of the Common People party declares that they are “seeking to form a majority Westminster government”. Well, that’s going to be tough because they’re only standing in one constituency, St Ives.

They say they believe in a rehabilitation-focused justice system, nationalising utilities, scrapping almost all “multicellular” farming and replacing it with algae farms, and giving votes to 12-year-olds.

Anyway, I’d have been a lot less confused about this party if I’d started with their election flyer, where the candidate wears his hammer-and-sickle beret. Now I get it.

The Mitre TW9

This party sounds like the name and address of a pub, and that’s because it is the name and address of a pub. The Mitre is in Richmond, and its owner Chris French is standing in Richmond Park as a publicity stunt for his business.

Mr French told the Press Association:

“…about 12 months ago, I stumbled across that if I actually registered to run in the election, I would actually get the free advertising on 77,000 ballot papers”.

The Yoruba Party in the UK

Founded by Olusola Oni, the Yoruba Party supports the Yoruban separatist movement in Nigeria. Oni wrote that he was trying to imitate the model and success of the UK Independence Party:

“YorubExit, like Brexit, is all about sovereignty. The question is how we Yoruba could play this sovereignty card, and make the people of Britain support Yoruba sovereignty. To achieve this requires that the Yoruba have a direct political voice at Westminster.”

Good luck with that.

The True and Fair Party

Remember Gina Miller of Miller and Miller 2 fame? Her first legal action against the UK government forced a parliamentary vote to trigger the Article 50 process that took the UK out of the EU, and her second undid the prorogation of Parliament by Boris Johnson. True and Fair is her party, and I have to say they have lovely branding and a pretty logo.

Politically, True and Fair wants to “fix our broken politics”, do some positive stuff on climate, and rejoin the EU. Mostly, I’m not sure why they aren’t just part of the LibDems.

UK Voice

Nope, not the talent show. This is a one-man party contesting SW Herts, with a dry and technocratic manifesto. The most important question I have is: does Pipaliya Ketankumar, the candidate, had a mustache or not?

The official election materials are contradictory on this important question.

Their logo is a map of the UK, coloured in a Union Jack, holding an umbrella while speaking into an old-time radio microphone. So yeah.

Volt UK

Set up as the British branch of the European federalist Volt Europa party, Volt UK ran a joint slate with Rejoin EU (see above) for the London Assembly election back in May, keeping their deposits with 2.5% of the vote.

The only real policies on their website are rejoining the EU and rejoining all of the other stuff around the EU, like Erasmus and Euratom.

Also their main colour is purple, which is all a bit UKIP.

AI Steve

Finally, an honourable mention for AI Steve, the avatar of Steve Endacott, who’s standing in Brighton Pavillion. Endacott promises, if elected, to vote in accordance with what AI Steve tells him to do.

You can go to the website and talk to “AI Steve”, which uses a large language model, voice recognition and voice-to-text to create a very natural sounding person. But it was only one question in that it started making stuff up, as you can see above. ChatGPT was not developed by Meta AI. I also asked about its voice and it said it doesn’t have a voice, because the text model doesn’t know about the voice-to-text service.

It’s a cute stunt, but neither Steve registered a political party so it doesn’t really belong on this list.

Polling day is in just over two weeks. None of the candidates on this list will win, of course, and most of them won’t even get enough votes to save their deposits. But there’s something of the carnival about these hopeless parties, some silly, some very serious, giving it a go.

They didn’t publish it. It was a busy week and they felt it didn’t quite hit home.

I tweaked it a bit in early 2022 but it never found space in the magazine and ended up buries.

Now Ed Zitron at Insider has published an article declaring the Metaverse ‘dead’, I thought I might as well exhume my original analysis of why I thought metaverses would mostly fail, to see how well it holds up.

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Why the Metaverse and much of this year’s tech will flop (January 2022)

Years ago, I used to help run a political simulation in Minecraft. 

It started off as an experiment, designed to simulate certain specific aspects of the real world: limited resources, the ability to use coercive force (a player could ‘imprison’ another) and some other tools needed to form a society. Hundreds of participants ran their own virtual societies, squabbling over non-aggression, the nature of land ownership and which political system was best. 

There was a real-world economy: one player used to sell 40 in-game diamonds, a hard to find resource, for a bitcoin, then worth a couple of dollars. There was drama, tension and eventually a full-scale war when players from a combat-focused Minecraft server invaded, capturing dozens of players and imprisoning them over a period of months.

Today, people would call it a Metaverse. 

We like to imagine that advances in technology lead to new physical products: smartphones, robot vacuum cleaners and, one day, Jetsons-style flying cars. But often innovation is little more than giving an old idea a catchy new name. You could download recordings from the Internet before anyone used the word 'podcast'. There were personal diaries online before they started calling them blogs. And there were virtual worlds long before the Metaverse.

Second Life was one of the earliest popular examples, and it's already old enough to vote (it opened in 2003). In Second Life, players shared a 3D world and could design their own avatar, 'own' land, build houses, buy clothes and generally interact with each other to make new friends. Of course, like all new technologies, people used it for sex; it still has a large fetish scene.

More recent examples include the cubist open-world games Minecraft and Roblox. 

This year (2022) is supposed to be the Year of the Metaverse. Even Facebook has renamed itself ‘Meta’ to try and claim the label for itself. Apparently, we’re all going to be doing work meetings around VR conference tables, talking to 3D avatars of our colleagues, looking out the fake windows at the fake view while Trevor from Accounting explains that we missed our very real Q4 sales targets. 

The trouble is all Metaverse ideas are uninspiring. A video circulated recently of a Walmart shopping concept: you’d walk down infinite rows of virtual aisles, manually picking up virtual products from virtual shelves and putting them in your virtual trolley. It seemed substantially worse than normal online shopping via a supermarket’s website.

Even worse, an advert from Facebook/Meta shows someone using a computer-generated computer and keyboard inside their metaverse, as if the virtual world should recreate all the most tedious parts of an office job.

This sudden rush into metaverses makes sense as a reaction to two years of a global pandemic that made the outside world feel dangerous, while keeping people home isolated from their friends and colleagues. The possibility of a safer, cleaner, more sterile way of working and socialising perhaps feels like an idea whose time has come. 

With a massive shortage of computer chips, global supply chain issues and two years of a pandemic, actual products are hard to come by. The PlayStation 5 and X Box X were supposed to be the hot new games systems of Christmas 2020, but more than a year on it can still be hard to find one in the shops. With no hard physical products to sell, technology companies have been forced to turn to the realm of ideas. 

Armed with generous furlough benefits or stimulus cheques, but with no travelling, restaurants and entertainment closed and the PlayStation still out of stock, people had money to spend and nothing to spend it on. Cryptocurrencies and Reddit-inspired ‘meme stock’ rushes in a bull market created tens of thousands of newfound millionaires— millennials and zoomers who'd made it big overnight and wanted to show off.

A lot of them bought 2021’s hot tech craze, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Ignore all the technical stuff about blockchains; NFTs are just digital tokens that can be issued and bought like certificates of authenticity or ownership. They’re supposed to allow people to ‘buy’ digital art, even if the actual art is freely available online to anyone who wants it. Digital artist Beeple made AMOUNT auctioning NFTs of his works. A blocky pixel art image of an ape wearing a bandana sold for more than ten million dollars in December. 

Everyone’s getting in on the act, selling NFTs to people who think they’ll make them rich one day: Pizza Hut, Barbie, the Associated Press, football clubs, Paris Hilton… Someone even tried to sell an NFT of one of my tweets, but I don’t think anyone was stupid enough to buy it. 

But outside of the small number of hyper-expensive prestige projects like Beeple or the Bored Apes, 99 per cent of NFTs being sold now will be completely worthless in a couple of years. You might well buy an NFT from Paris Hilton, but you’ll never be able to sell it to anyone else. These global brands are taking advantage of gullible people who think ‘crypto’ NFTs might be the next Bitcoin, but it’s the NFT sellers who are getting rich, not the deluded buyers.

NFTs are also supposed to enable ‘Web3’, which is already 2022’s hottest new buzzword. You're going to hear some very enthusiastic people talking excitedly about web3 this year. Don't worry if you don't understand what they’re talking about; nobody else does either.

Web3 is some new conception of the Internet powered by blockchains, NFTs and decentralised ownership — like if websites were tech Kibbutzim but with a lot more billionaires. Its proponents argue that the current Internet is too dominated by a few big companies. The average user doesn’t own anything: Twitter can take away your account because it’s not your account, it’s theirs. Instagram can force your popular business to rename itself when the company decides it wants the name ‘metaverse’ for its new project. 

In the web3 future, users will have inalienable NFTs instead, which will let them do… well, that’s not especially clear. One model is the Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO), where holders of the NFTs get voting rights much like shareholders. A DAO raised $47M to buy a copy of the US Constitution at auction. It didn’t win, and is refunding the money. 

Most of the web3 babble is little more than wishful thinking. Even Decentralized Autonomous Organisations need leaders; ten thousand people can’t make day-to-day decisions. The problems web3 claims to solve — control, ownership, free speech, authenticity — all persist, just in different forms and with more complicated crypto-woo to make people feel empowered and convince them to open their wallets.

Which brings us back to metaverses. For all the talk about the metaverse, there will be dozens of companies all competing to do their own metaverse-y things in very different ways.

On one side are the established platforms like Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Epic and Roblox, nudging their combined billions of users to don a 3D headset. 

On the other are web3 newcomers who see metaverses as being all about blockchains, and cryptostuff. They expect their users to claim metaverse land with cryptocurrency and buy in-world NFT items like clothes and accessories. 

It’s not going to work. These companies have no incentive to cooperate or inter-operate. A user’s avatar on one platform won’t look the same on a rival, and users in different metaverses won’t be able to talk to each other. That £200 NFT Louis Vitton handbag from cryptoverse won’t transfer to Facebook’s Horizon. Far from a metaverse, they’ll end up as isolated meta-islands shamelessly copying each other’s ideas as they fight for users.

But metaverses have a bigger problem. The technology trends of 2021 were a response to the scary outside created by the pandemic, keeping people home and limiting innovation to the realm of the conceptual. The rush to build these metaverses comes from a place of fear: people's fear of Covid and retreat into another world of safe, sterile imagination; Facebook's fear of losing the next generation of users to a rival like TikTok. Crypto-investors’ fear of missing out on the next gold rush. 

Fear doesn’t inspire creativity or drive innovation. It tries to preserve. And so we get metaverse boardrooms with metaverse laptops for people to type metaverse memos, and metaverse shopping centres with imaginary aisles. 

That's not how people use virtual worlds. They’re an escape from the daily grind, not the grind itself. What’s the point of a Second Life that’s just the same as your actual life? People don't just want avatars that look like creepy 3d versions of themselves; they want to be teenage supermodels, or 9 foot tall with purple skin, anthropomorphic cows or flying fire-breathing dragons. They want to play in a virtual world, not work in one. The companies building metaverses have forgotten that the whole point of escapism is to escape, not more of the same.  

The economic bubble that’s buoyed tech stocks and cryptocurrencies is deflating quickly and looks like it might burst altogether. As 2021’s new millionaires look at their portfolios heavily in the red, how many will still drop a quarter of a million pounds on a digital token that says they own a sketch of an ape in a baseball cap? 

And as the Omicron wave hopefully marks the end of the Covid-19 pandemic as the virus becomes endemic instead, who will still choose a metaverse to meet friends rather than a bar? Who will choose a metaverse for an office meeting over an actual physical meeting room — or, at least, a Zoom? 

Dozens of companies are building metaverses. The majority of them will be expensive ghost towns that never attract a significant user-base. But some of the more creative platforms might find their niches.

And they can always follow Second Life’s example and pivot to sex.

That always sells.

The most fundamental principle of democracy is accepting that you don’t get to decide.

That sounds backwards. We’re sold democracy as being all about deciding. And it is. But it’s not about YOU deciding. It’s a system that makes it OK that you didn’t decide.

You followed the election, read the materials, chose who to vote for based on what policies you supported. You cast your ballot. But the other lot won. Believing in democracy means means wanting two contradictory things. It means believing that the people you didn’t support should still be in charge and get to implement policies you oppose.

Well, it means those things if you lose. If you always win, democracy can feel like you actually do get to decide and have things your way.

True democracy, though, is more than 51% of the people deciding for the other 49%. In a real democracy, the majority will also have things it wants to do but will be told ‘no’. Laws, constitutions, courts, international treaties… the Rule of Law that acts as a check and balance against the dictatorship of the majority.

If 51% of the population elect 51% of the legislators on a platform of murdering the other 49%, it wouldn’t be ‘democratic’ to start the killings. If legislators pass a law that bans any criticism of the government, or cancels elections, or bans women from voting, a real democracy has speed-bumps, road blocks and full on walls to stop such laws coming quickly into effect.

Democracy is about accepting that you don’t get to decide when you lose. And it’s about accepting that there are things you can’t do even if you win.

We don’t talk about that enough.

Israel’s System of Government

Israel’s system of government is fundamentally a bit of a mess.

The region had been a part of the Ottoman empire for a few centuries before it was conquered by the Allies during the First World War and ended up as a British-controlled territory under a League of Nations mandate. The British brought some elements of English and UK law and governance to Israel, while keeping some laws under the old Ottoman systems.

When Israel declared independence in May 1948, the new country declared in its Scroll of Independence:

…“until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called "Israel".

Well, October 1948 came and went, and 74 years later Israel still hasn’t adopted a formal written constitution, making it one of just three democracies without one —the others are New Zealand and the UK.

Instead, the first law passed by the provisional council, the Law and Administration Ordinance, declared:

The law which existed in Palestine on the 14th May, 1948 shall remain in force… subject to such modifications as may result from the establishment of the State and its authorities.

Israel ended up with a hodgepodge system of government modelled on the Westminster system of an elected parliament (the Knesset), an appointed government of parliamentarians, and a figurehead president who takes the constitutional role, more or less, of the monarch in the UK.

Unlike the UK, though, Israel opted for a small parliament of only 120 members in a single House.

The United States Constitution was crafted to create a rivalry between the three branches of government (the Presidency, Congress and the Courts), giving each branch powers to check the others and forcing them to cooperate to get things done. In reality those checks have often failed, because the rivalry between the political parties has been stronger than the rivalry between the branches. But the principle was noble enough.

People complain that the system gets logjammed and it can be hard to get anything done, but that’s a feature, not a bug (another thing about true democracies: they’re slow). A President can’t just do whatever he wants. Between two houses of Congress, federal courts and the states themselves, each with their own three branches of government, there are plenty of checks on power.

In the UK, the distinction between the three branches of government is artificial, because sitting at the top of all of them is one bloke with a crown. The government is drawn from the House of Commons itself.

Despite all that, though, in reality the UK has evolved checks on power. The House of Commons is big enough that no government can hope to fully control it. Its Select Committees are proudly independent, with several being chaired by Opposition members. Ministerial question times, weekly Prime Minister’s question time and statements allow MPs from both the Opposition but also the governing party an opportunity to public hold ministers to account.

The House of Lords isn’t elected and it can’t outright block laws but can delay them for a year, or force the government to make changes if it’s in a rush. The courts review government actions and decisions all the time, and occasionally they’ll even find that a law contravenes the Human Rights Act, causing Parliament to change it. And behind all of that is the European Court of Human Rights.

In Israel, the one-chamber Knesset is too small to be independent. Its committees are a joke. Ministerial questions are infrequent and pointless. Debates on legislation degenerate into screaming matches more often than not. The governing coalition usually has complete control over the outcome of every vote. Legislation can and often is rushed through the Knesset with little substantial debate, the entire legislative process sometimes taking mere days from when the government writes the bill. As long as the coalition holds, the distinction between the government and the Knesset seems like merely a formality.

Israel had no formal checks and balances. So it evolved some.

Israel’s Checks and Balances

Instead of writing the promised constitution, the Knesset instead passed constitutional laws called Basic Laws. These law define the workings of the Knesset, the government, and other aspects of the State. Over time, they began functioning a little like a written constitution, and the Supreme Court started treating them like a constitution. Two special Basic Laws — the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty and the Basic Law on Freedom of Occupation — were passed in the early 1990s. These laws contained something like the following passage:

There shall be no violation of rights under this Basic Law except by a law befitting the values of the State of Israel, enacted for a proper purpose, and to an extent no greater than is required.

Israel’s Supreme Court understood this clause as giving the Court the mandate to strike down subsequent legislation that violated these two Basic Laws.

The Court over the decades has assumed other authorities. Like most administrative law courts, it reviews government actions for lawfulness; it has also taken the British legal principle of Wednesbury Unreasonableness and interpreted it broadly to block unreasonable administrative decisions by government and its agencies.

The Supreme Court is a court of first instance for public law questions in Israel, and it’s adopted a very broad notion of standing to facilitate access.

All of this has evolved without formal statutes empowering the Court to do these things, in the way that other common-law jurisdictions function.

In response to and in tandem with a powerful court, the legal advisers in every department became a de facto check on executive power. These advisers, independent civil servants, can block government departments from engaging in actions that they believe to be unlawful. The Attorney General in the role of chief government legal adviser has a similar role.

Over recent decades, though, right wing governments have chafed at the restrictions that the Court has imposed on the government’s freedom to act. Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has been one of the Right’s nemeses. Accused of being far-Left, undemocratic, political and biased, successive right-wing governments have threatened to bring the Court to heel.

With Israel’s pure Right-Religious coalition, that time seems to have come.

The plan

Yariv Levin, the Justice Minister from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, has been waiting for this moment for years. His plan for “reforming the Justice system” is more wide-ranging than anyone expected and took even his supporters by surprise. It includes:

• Making it much harder for the Supreme Court to strike down laws, requiring a supermajority of an expanded panel

• Allowing the Knesset to re-legislate laws if they are struck down anyway

• Abolishing unreasonableness entirely as a grounds for judicial review

• Making government legal advisers into political appointees instead of civil servants

• Giving the government a majority of votes on the Judicial Appointments Commission

• Giving the Judicial Appointments Commission, with its new government majority, the power to appoint the President of the Court, a role currently awarded based on seniority.

Together, these proposals essentially allow an Israeli government with a bare majority in the Knesset to do whatever it wants.

Choosing Judges

In most democracies, the government doesn’t choose judges. Mostly, there are judicial appointments panels made up of a mix of judges, lawyers, other experts, perhaps some elected officials or their appointees. This process, that prevents governments from appointing tame judges, is an important check on executive power that preserves the independence of the judiciary.

It’s also one of the Israeli Right’s most persistent complaints, usually framed as ‘the judges choose themselves!’ In America, we are reminded, the President gets to choose the judges so why can’t the Israeli PM? The differences in the countries’ constitutional setups aside, the US today is hardly a recommendation for how to ensure an impartial, apolitical Supreme Court with the trust of the public.

All of this is happening while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial for bribery and misconduct in public office. The proposed changes to the Judicial Appointments Commission will give Netanyahu complete control over the future careers of the judges hearing his case and, if convicted, appeal. Israel had no juries; these are the people who will decide on his guilt or innocence, and he’s making himself their boss.

Guardrails

My flat has a balcony. I didn’t grow up with balconies in my life and it took me a little while to be comfortable with them, but now I happily hang out there, confident that the 1.2m high guardrail is enough to ensure I can’t just fall off.

Once there are guardrails, people adapt, worrying less about risky behaviours because, well, they aren’t so risky anymore. The wall-climber with a harness and a crash mat underneath can reach for smaller and further handholds than if she was climbing untethered. The driving student knows that he can still cause accidents, but that the instructor can help prevent them by braking for him.

When I used to run political campaigns in civil society organisations, sometimes there would be a vote on a motion that we wanted to defeat. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost, and often there was some unknown third option that popped up at the last minute: the motion got remitted, or taken to parts, or composited with something else that changed its meaning.

The toughest ones to win, though, were the times that the motion was ruled ultra vires ahead of the vote. Some apparatchik would stand up and announce that the motion wouldn’t actually come into effect, but everyone would still get to vote on it.

Those motions always passed. Because what’s the harm of voting for something if there’s no consequences? And often the symbolic victory is more important than the policy win.

Something similar happens in the United States, where states pass outrageous laws without worrying too much about the consequences, confident that the courts will strike them down and save them from themselves.

Some of the most draconian anti-abortion laws, for example, were passed by states where the legislators didn’t have to consider the real harm they might do to women, because they knew that the laws would be blocked under Roe v Wade.

Take away the guardrails and everyone is suddenly behaving dangerously. Roe was struck down, and now multiple states have repressive anti-abortion laws that may never have been passed if they knew they were really legislating and not just playing.

However right-wing a coalition, there will always be a right wing of that coalition. Israeli governments have been able to pander to their right wing by passing laws and making administrative decisions that they know the Supreme Court will strike down, and then whip up their voters about the awful Court. They trusted the guardrails to keep themselves in line.

No more. Now they’ll either have to be responsible and not pass the bad laws, or pass them proudly. My guess is they’ll take the second route but it will be the rest of us facing the consequences. And there’s always someone else to blame. Maybe the media, or NGOs, or the Deep State.

Opposition

The plan to cripple Israel’s justice system is not popular.

Netanyahu and his coalition partners only won about half of the votes in the November 2022 election, scraping a majority of seats when some opposition parties dropped below the electoral threshold. Likud’s election campaign centered on security and the cost of living; Judicial reforms were barely mentioned. With an upswing in terror attacks and Gaza rockets, nobody expected that this would be the government’s single-minded focus.

Even among Likud voters, some 40% oppose the proposals. Among the opposition supporters there is panic, anger and despair.

But there’s also determination. Banks, universities, high-tech firms, judges, lawyers, retired generals, every living former Attorney General, former Likud Knesset members… opposition is growing.

On the other side, the tone of the government is growing frantic, with one Likud Knesset member claiming that the President of the Supreme Court, Esther Hayut, was ‘to blame’ for a terrorist attack that killed two young boys on Friday.

On Monday, the first stage of the judicial reform package — the Judicial Appointments Commission takeover — will receive its First Reading in the Knesset.

To coincide with the debate, a mass protest will be held outside the Knesset in Jerusalem. Campaigners have called for a General Strike, not supported by the trade unions but informal. Many high-tech companies will close for the day, as will university departments.

On Sunday night, just a few hours ago, Israel’s president Isaac Herzog made an unprecedented intervention. Stop and talk, he begged all sides. There could be a more moderate reform that’d fix the guardrails rather than scrapping them altogether. The constitutional arrangements are all a bit of a mess. They could be better. He proposed a few reasonable suggestions.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid quickly accepted the proposal to talk. Justice Minister Levin rejected the suggestion, vowing to push ahead with no delays.

Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t even respond.

I don’t know how this is all going to play out. There is a level of anger out there that feels new. Opponents of the government believe that this is a systemic attack on democracy. Supporters believe it’s an essential step in rooting out the traitors and Leftists.

This is how democracies die. It always starts with the judiciary. Turkey, Hungary, Poland… it’s a playbook by now.

Next comes the media, usually, which Netanyahu supporters already call the “propaganda channels” because “fake news” was taken. Or the civil service, which is already in the firing line.

I’m just hoping that the scale of the opposition will make someone reconsider, someone take a step back and ask if this is really the path they want to choose for the country.

I keep coming back to the same, depressing thought: you don’t pass laws giving the government untrammelled, unreviewable power unless you’re pretty confident you’re never going to be in the opposition, on the receiving end of that power, again.

Sure, the current UK election polls put Labour anywhere from 14% to a whopping 29% ahead of the Conservatives, making an an average 21% lead. Sure, the more extreme of those polls, combined with MRP modelling, point to the Tories winning fewer than 100 seats.

But polls narrow.

Yeah, the IMF reports that the UK is the only G7 economy expected to contract. The NHS is genuinely collapsing, with more than 1000 people a month dying due to delays in ambulances and emergency medicine.

But polls tighten.

OK, maybe the Tories are on their third Prime Minister in the space of a year. Perhaps they are mired in constant scandals relating to Boris Johnson, dodgy money, dodgy appointments, ministerial bullying and who knows what else. Granted, they’re a deeply divided party, with low-tax libertarians at war with populist culture warriors while they refight the two recent coups and leadership elections.

But they’ll bring it back, yeah?

Well, maybe. But there’s nothing inevitable about this at all, and the universe where the Conservative Party collapses to, say, 80 seats after the next general election is at least somewhat probable.

Marios Richards just wrote a newsletter post making this point (read it!), and others like James Austin and Sam Freedman have been gently noting for weeks that an electoral wipeout is something to be taken seriously:

No natural floors

Political parties are not natural forces. They can lead for decades and then vanish.

In 2012, the French Socialist Party won 280 seats, close to a majority in the National Assembly. In 2017, they collapsed to 45 seats as their voters flocked to Macron’s new party. By 2022, they were merely a junior partner in the NUPES list headed by far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Here in Israel, the Labour Party founded the actual state and was a major party from 1948 until 2003, became a weakened but significant party until 2019 and is now a minor fragment of a party, fighting to keep above the electoral threshold.

There are examples closer to home. The Liberal Party’s long history as half of the UK’s two-party system came to an end in the early 20th Century until they were winning single-figure seat totals in the post-war period. The Conservatives were wiped out in Scotland and Wales in 1997, only for the Scottish National Party to win 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in 2015. The Ulster Unionist Party and SDLP in Northern Ireland faded away to be replaced by the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively.

We tend, at times, to think of parties having a natural floor, a level beyond which their support cannot really fall. But that’s really extrapolating from very limited data. There aren’t, statistically speaking, very many general elections, and to start getting a useful sample size you end up going back so far that the world looks too different to draw any conclusions (The Great Reform Act of 1832, universal franchise in 1928, World War II, devolution, etc et al.). The rules of politics are barely even guidelines.

So let’s imagine….

It’s late 2024. Rishi Sunak has led the Conservative Party into its worst electoral defeat in history. Despite his half-hearted attempt to fight the general election on “Culture War” issues, Sunak lost voters both to Labour and a small but significant few percent to Reform UK on his right. Keir Starmer’s Labour won 47% of the vote, with some tactical voting helping both him and the Liberal Democrats to defeat Tory incumbents.

Labour stand on 488 seats. The Conservatives have just 72, despite winning nearly a quarter of voters.

Labour majority: 326

This scenario isn’t particularly far-fetched. But what would the next few years look like?

Labour Party Unity and Discipline

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is unusually disciplined right now. The hunger for power and Starmer’s own occasionally-ruthless party management style has ended decades of power struggles at the top.

This is a big change after New Labour v Old Labour, Clause Four, the TB/GBs, the constant anti-Brown plotting, the mess of the Miliband years and full-scale Civil War of the Corbyn era. Starmer and the Labour leadership have their critics but they don’t have a powerful, organised and mobilised opposition inside the party. Everyone is too eager to win.

In power, with a whopping great majority, the truce will end overnight.

Parties with big majorities are impossible to manage because the stakes are too low. 100 MPs can vote against the government and they’ll still win votes in the Commons. Large caucuses inherently invite division and subgroups.

In a landslide, the manifesto becomes a critical party management tool, tying MPs into voting for laws they were elected to pass. There must be a temptation to run the next election campaign with a vague “we are responsible adults who’ll fix all the bad stuff sensibly” message rather than risk scaring off voters with cold hard policies. That’d be a mistake. Presenting a detailed manifesto with concrete policies will help the leadership actually get things done while in power.

But there’s a limit, and factionalism is inevitable. Starmer won’t be able to rule a huge PLP with an iron fist, and it wouldn’t be wise to try.

Candidate Quality

It’s the places you don’t expect to win that get you in trouble. Some of the most difficult MPs in the 2019 Conservative intake were those who weren’t thoroughly vetted because nobody thought they’d actually get elected. Nobody expected Nick Clegg to lose his seat to Labour, which is how Jared O’Mara was briefly an MP.

In our mega-landslide scenario, some of the new Labour MPs will be people who were in no hope seats — surprise winners who beat Tory big beasts or anonymous Home Counties Conservatives. One of them might be a British George Santos (or another Jared O’Mara).

Broken Opposition

The Westminster system isn’t equipped to handle a small party as the official Opposition. A 72-seat Tory party wouldn’t be able to fill a full shadow Front Bench team, let alone have enough backbenchers to fill Select Committees and ask Parliamentary Questions.

Democratic Deficit

First Past the Post means that, in our scenario, the Conservatives can win 24% of the national vote and still come away with only 72 seats.

That’s not a new feature of the British political system, but it does become a problem if the will and votes of a quarter of the population is only expressed in the Commons by 11% of MPs.

Yes, it was also a problem when 12% of the population voted for UKIP in 2015 and got only one MP to show for it. But that sort of makes the point about how unfulfilled political aspirations can lead to problematic outcomes.

Most immediately, I can imagine a rise in far-Right support as a consequence.

Abhorring a Vacuum

When I’ve mentioned that the Tories could be wiped out at the next election, a common reaction is “Hurray!”

I worry, though, about what might replace the Conservative Party as the dominant force of right-wing politics in the UK. Like the National Front in France or AfD in Germany, far-right national populists are usually the beneficiaries when mainstream conservative parties die or are wounded. It’s not hard to imagine Reform UK filling the gap, especially targeting working-class, former industrial areas in Northern England.

The other possibility is that the Tory Party itself is seized fully by its own national populists, as happened to the Republicans in the United States. Fearing the risk of bleeding out to their right, and with a radicalised party rank and file, the Conservatives might choose this path. The leadership election to replace Rishi Sunak as Leader of the Opposition would be where that battle is fought in the first instance; the party grassroots will probably choose the most right-wing, culture warriorish candidate whether the MPs back them or not.

Perhaps polls will narrow after all. The economy will improve, the NHS will survive, people will forget about sleaze and Labour’s discipline will collapse.

Perhaps the Tories will boot Rishi Sunak and find some hitherto-unknown MP to be the new prime minister who everyone will love.

Perhaps natural political forces will mean that Labour squeak a small majority or just fall short.

Perhaps Starmer will win in a landslide, but with a ‘normal’ 100-seat majority and 200 Tory MPs.

Perhaps.

But it’s certainly time to start thinking about what British politics would look like if the polls get a tiny bit wider instead of narrower, and the Conservative Party suffers a historic wipe-out loss.

I am now locked out of Twitter after Twitter detected the suspicious behaviour, but I no way of getting back in because the attackers changed the contact details I need to do a password reset.

Anyone have any suggestions? Can anyone ask @twittersupport to encourage them to take a look?

UPDATE: It seems that my account is also ‘shadowbanned’, meaning my old tweets don’t show up in Twitter timelines or threads. At all. You just see “this tweet is unavailable”.

"Above a certain follower count, your twitter feed is basically a newspaper, and I wish there was a voluntary code of conduct to reflect that. No amplifying stuff you haven't personally checked is true; and no hostile quote-tweeting random people with a handful of followers"

The whole notion got me thinking about what a voluntary code of conduct for Twitter users would (or should) look like. At the time I jotted down a few disorganised thoughts in a thread:

The idea wouldn’t go away and I kept thinking that someone really ought to try and explore the ethical issues that come with being a random schmo with a large online platform. I asked Helen if she wanted to lead the charge, but she’s writing a book and said she didn’t feel any need to own this project. So here we are.

Not about rules

This isn’t about what Twitter itself allows users to do or say. With Elon Musk poised to take over Twitter, promising to loosen the platform’s already-lax policies, rules might be irrelevant soon.

This project will, I think, try to figure out what (if any) ethical obligations come with having a big social media following. Ethical obligations are complicated and can overlap and conflict with each other. I’m resistant of being labelled a ‘journalist’ because that label seems to come with a bunch of ethical obligations.

But let’s start with where she started: pile ons.

The Pile On

I’m guessing most readers of this newsletter have never experienced a pile-on. How bad can it be?

Well, it can be pretty bad. I’ve never been REALLY in the crosshairs but I’ve had a few minor incidents, usually when I criticise some ‘Great Man’. Dozens or hundreds of tweets, DMs, emails, Facebook messages, comments on my personal Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms. In the past I’ve had letters and complaints sent to my employers demanding that I’m fired.

These messages are usually abusive, calling me an idiot, a shill, a tool of ‘them’, a Zionist stooge, a leftist moron etc. Sometimes they’re more directly threatening. Often they mock my appearance. Sometimes they’re racist. A few times I’ve been sent image edits of my face on murder victims or being put in a crematorium at a Nazi death camp.

Compared to many targets of pile-ons, my experiences are relatively mild. I’m a straight man, so I’ve gotten very few rape threats. Nobody has ever turned up outside my door threatening me, or sent me anything in the physical mail.

Yet there’s something oddly unsettling about it anyway. I find myself shaken, nervous, vulnerable in the face of a wall of abuse from strangers popping up all over my online footprint.

And this is me. I’ve faced physical violence at protests and death threats from terrorist groups with the means to make good on their words. I’m a battle-hardened keyboard warrior from before the Eternal September who’s seen it all and should have skin a foot thick by now. But the tidal wave of angry, haughty, dismissive people jeering, mocking, threatening and well-acktcully-ing always shakes me anyway.

And like I said, my pile-ons have been small, brief affairs, nothing like the torrent of continual abuse some people face.

I guess my guiding premise here is that pile-ons are usually bad. Call me a moderate, a centrist dad, a wimp not prepared to fight for what I believe in. But I believe psychological and emotional harms are real harms and, on balance, I prefer not to harm people even when I oppose them.

The Sorites Paradox: When does a pile become a pile (on)?

The Greek philosopher Eubulides posed a famous problem:

Imagine a heap of sand. How many grains of sand does a typical heap contain? Let’s say a million.

OK, now imagine you take away one grain from the the heap. Is it still a heap? Of course it is.

What about another grain. Still a heap? Yes, obviously. Now one more…. when does a heap stop being a heap?

Equally, how many grains of sand do you need before they become a heap?

The Sorites paradox isn’t really a paradox, but it’s an illustration of collective effects. The line between individuals and a collective is fuzzy and hard to define. The same is true of the line between individual actions and a collective or supervenient phenomenon.

The Sin of Sodom (no, not that one)

In the Book of Genesis, the city of Sodom is destroyed by God due to its inhabitants’ “wickedness”.

The story showcases one particular act of wickedness: an attempted gang rape of two male visitors. In Christian thought, that was enough to say the sin of Sodom must be… not rape, for some reason, but homosexuality, giving rise to the word ‘sodomy’.

The Jewish tradition treats Sodom a bit differently. The Talmud relates a series of legends about Sodom that depicts a city built on xenophobia and exploiting the poor and weak. One memorable example of how the people of Sodom treated strangers is related below:

[In Sodom, if] anyone had a row of bricks, each of the people of Sodom would come and take one brick and say to him “I am taking only one” and they would keep doing this until none remained.

And when there was anyone who would put garlic or onions out to dry, each and every one of the people of Sodom would come and take one and say to him: “I only took one!”

A brick or an onion were small, almost valueless items. Stealing one wasn’t worthy of the attention of the law. Nevertheless, acting individually but en masse, following the culture and conventions of the town, the residents left new people penniless. And if the victim confronted any of the thieves, each one would reply “but I only took one!”

Coordinated or Organic Action

Mass online harassment usually isn’t centrally organised. Occasionally you’ll see someone with a large platform saying outright “Go tell X what you think of her dumb ideas!”, or some poor soul being targeted by anons on the chans, but those situations are the significant minority.

On Twitter, what mostly happens is someone writes a Bad Tweet. People relentlessly Quote-Tweet the bad tweet, mocking it. Eventually, people with large numbers of followers do the same. That exposes the Bad Tweeters to millions of people, 99% of whom do nothing.

But one in a thousand of these millions does more. Some of them are just pugilistic types who enjoy a good Internet fight. Some of them see that dunking on the Bad Tweet gets engagement and they want in. Some of them usually don’t do anything, but this particular Bad Tweet upsets or angers them.

Most of these, too, confine themselves to quote-tweeting or replying to the Bad Tweet, perhaps in harsh terms. Those thousands of tiny, understandable and basically OK reactions all add up into a heap when experienced by the target.

And an even smaller group sometimes takes it further and move to full-on harassment, online and off.

Knowledge and Responsibility

So it’s not enough just to say “I didn’t tell anyone to harass her” or “I didn’t know anyone would harass her”, because at this point anyone with a large following should know that just exposing someone can be enough to cause harassment.

Clearly, though, a discourse where you just can’t talk about other people, their ideas and their actions isn’t really much of a discourse at all. Of course we’re going to share things we agree with, discuss things that challenge us and refute stuff we think is wrong. Of course, often — perhaps usually — other factors will outweigh concerns about pile-ons and online harassment.

Here are some factors I try to consider when deciding whether to amplify something I disagree with in order to debunk or criticise it:

How big is this person’s platform?

Do they have 50 followers or half a million? If their social media following is small, are they important or influential in other ways, eg a candidate for office, a politician, a TV star?

How far did this person’s take, comment or action reach?

Is this a currently-obscure comment that deserves wider exposure due to the person’s importance? Is it something that’s gone massively viral despite their normally low profile? Or neither?

Does it illustrate a broader point?

Forum comments etc can sometimes help tell a story about how a community is reacting to an issue, spreading a conspiracy theory etc. Is the whole more than the sum of its parts?

[ADDED] Did this person contact me first?

If someone replies to me on Twitter, is that a bit like a letter to a newspaper? If they’re talking about me, does that give me a moral right to reply? Even if so, is it worth it in this case?

Rules I will try to follow (first draft!)

Taking this all into account, here’s my first draft of the rules I’ll try to follow when thinking about amplification, outrage and pile-ons on Twitter:

1. It’s very easy to fire off a tweet in seconds that can have major implications for other people. I will try to think before I tweet.

2. Psychological and emotional harms are real harms. I will remember that I can harm people on this platform.

3. I am not responsible for the actions of people who read my tweets. But I am aware of how online autonomous action can develop organically, and will bear this in mind before I tweet.

4. I will try to ensure I am fighting the bad things, not primarily spreading the bad things. I won’t amplify bad things just for the sake of amplification.

5. If the identity of the author is not relevant to my point, I will try to censor/redact names and other identifiable information, but with the awareness that a motivated person can still probably find this information if they want to.

6. Some things are so bad, so important, so wrong, or so dangerous that they override any concerns about pile-ons, even acknowledging the harms they cause.

What do you think? Are these too restrictive, too permissive or about right? Would you be comfortable to sign onto this if it was a section in a voluntary Twitter Code of Conduct?

I’ve opened comments for all and would be interested to hear your thoughts.

I blame my baby. Well, not him really, as much as his daycare. Since he started daycare I have been sick seven times: fevers as high as 104, coughs, vomiting and stomach bugs and even a bout of pneumonia. He’s been mostly fine, sniffly for a day or two and then quickly recovered. Daycare seems to be a system for importing germs into our home.

And then, just when I thought we were finally done, illness number seven was Covid.

I’ve managed to dodge the ‘Rona for two years, have been vaccinated with three doses and still wore high-filtration masks in public places, but there’s only so much you can do to avoid the virus.

Covid wasn’t so bad for me, though the baby had a bit of a rough time of it. I’m still a little fatigued but finally (mostly) back to normal. So here we are.

I’m going to try to publish once a week for the next few weeks because I owe you all some content and I have thoughts. You will hear them. I’m sorry.

A month ago, when Elon Musk bemoaned Twitter’s lack of free speech and asked “is a new platform needed?”, I thought he was about to set up another ‘free speech alternative’ to Twitter. Like Gab, Parler, Gettr, FRANK Speech and, most recently, Donald Trump’s own TRUTH Social, these platforms form their own little echo chambers but never come close to challenging the dominance of the blue bird.

Musk had other plans. Twitter’s board agreed to sell him the whole company for £34.5bn. The deal, if approved by Twitter’s shareholders, will put the social media home of politicians, journalists and opinion formers in the hands of one opinionated multibillionaire. 

Authentication

Elon promises a new direction for Twitter, committing to making its algorithms open source, “defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans”. 

The latter point poses some challenges. The theory, I suppose, is that people act more responsibly online if they have named and identifiable accounts. But these real name policies have their limits. The majority of the abuse, harassment and threats I receive online is from people proudly using their real names. 

Today, Twitter authenticates verified accounts (their famous ‘blue tick’) by demanding to see photo ID. Will every Twitter user in the world agree to send Musk a copy of their passport in order to stay on the site? That would pose risks to dissidents and insiders, exclude lots of younger users who might not have passports or driving licenses, and put an enormous amount of data and power in Twitter’s hands. It could scare off some of the nastiest harassers, but would also stifle legitimate subcultures like LBGT Twitter.

‘Free Speech’

The real focus of the takeover, though, is ‘free speech’. In his statement, Musk proclaims that  “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”. Yesterday he went further, explaining

“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law…Going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people”.

This was the reason that Musk’s purchase was greeted with excitement in the most extreme corners of the Internet, members of far-right forums and Telegram channels hoping that their time has come again. 

Free speech debates on the Internet are as old as the Internet itself. In the anarchic days before the big platforms, free speech online was a given. Most people could say whatever they wanted on their personal websites with little fear of consequences, but that’s because nobody read it in the first place!

Terrorists, neo-Nazis, violent anarchists and extremists of all kinds flourished in their own little niches. If they did somehow get kicked off of a host, there was always another. 

The purest example of the anything-goes approach to online speech exists the ‘chans’, anonymous messageboards with few rules and a spirit of chaos. On 4chan and 8chan, racist memes and caricatures sit alongside revenge porn, conspiracy theories and political manifestos. The chans gave rise to the hacker collective Anonymous, the QAnon movement, many popular Internet memes and, most disturbingly, several mass murderers who posted during their attacks. 

Rise of the Platforms

The rise of the big platforms changed things. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and the rest made it easy for extremists to gain mass exposure and followers, thanks to easy sharing and recommendation algorithms. On the other hand, it gave these platforms tremendous power: with a few clicks, they could shut it all down. 

Twitter’s approach to freedom of speech was originally quite permissive; the company was forced organically into taking tougher positions by public pressure and market forces. For example, the American Nazi Party had a Twitter account until 2017, when the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville ended in the murder of an anti-racism protester.

More recently, Twitter banned anti-vaccine propaganda during the coronavirus pandemic and, in late 2020, began to remove accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy movement. Of course, Twitter’s most dramatic move came on 8 January 2021, when the company banned its most famous user, then US president Donald Trump, in the wake of the insurrection attempt at the Capitol. 

Each of these moves provoked a backlash and, often, spawned a rival. The first was Gab, founded in 2016 by Andrew Torba. Gab has become a magnet for neo-Nazis and antisemites, perhaps encouraged (ironically) by racist posts made on Gab’s official Twitter account. 

But Gab was just too extreme for many US conservatives. A succession of Twitter clones focused on building a site that would be like Twitter but a little bit more right-wing. The latest and supposedly greatest of these clones is Truth Social, built by Donald Trump himself. Truth had a bumpy launch in the USA, with MAGA supporters flocking to join and hear from their leader, only to discover a confusing truth: Trump himself doesn’t appear to use it. 

Is Musk promising a free speech free-for-all on Twitter? Not quite. Spam, too, is a form of speech and he’s committed to stamping it out. But it’s not clear yet what Musk’s apparent promise of near-absolute free speech would look like.  

So much focus has been given to whether or not Donald Trump will be allowed back onto the platform that broader questions have been buried. Will Musk welcome back the American Nazi Party? The QAnon promoters who claim that world leaders are murdering children to drink their blood? The people who tried to organise a coup in America? Once, a group of neo-Nazis photoshopped me into a concentration camp crematorium. Will they be allowed to do it again?

When Musk says that he supports all free speech within the law — US law, of course — remember how far the law goes. All of these are lawful speech in the US:

• spam

• doxxing

• encouraging people to kill themselves

• posting photos of murdered and mutilated children

• posting Jihadi beheading videos

• making your profile picture a swastika

• Making your username “Lynch the N******” or “Gas the Kikes”1

• campaigning for abolishing the age of sexual consent

• posting long manifestos arguing that all Jews should be tortured to death

Will Musk allow them all?

These questions aren’t new. Every free speech platform faces challenges to its policies. Gettr bans Nazis. Parler bans porn. Truth Social puts content warnings on controversial posts. Even 4chan bans doxxing and removes livestreams of mass shooting attacks carried out by its members. ALL of them ban spam. Every platform ends up a censor in the end, because platforms need to censor to survive.

No Digital Sovereignty

And even a platform utterly committed to absolute free speech in US law has limits. There’s no true sovereignty online. British, European, even Russian and Chinese law dictate what content is allowed in their countries.

Will Musk bow meekly to the ‘will of the Chinese people’ when China, where half of all Teslas are made and 25% are bought, demands he block posts about the Uighurs? Will he say that the First Amendment applies to the globe?

It’s not just national borders that make digital sovereignty impossible. Google and Apple decide which apps are allowed in their app stores so they can be used on phones and which, like Gab, get banned. Telegram, which often refuses to censor extremists on its platform, was forced to restrict chat functionality for some of its worst offenders by the Big Two’s app stores (while keeping the bad content available on the desktop app).

Musk must know at least some of this because it’s obvious and because he has people to tell him. My gut feeling is he’s bluffing here. He’ll talk the talk, welcome back the Ivermectin crew and QAnon, remove disinformation labels and call it a win. So perhaps the changes to Twitter’s policies won’t be all that dramatic in the long term.

Platform Culture

But critiques of Twitter’s polices were always a bit misplaced. People were rarely (not never, but rarely) banned for their views alone; often the formal reasons for bans were for harassment, doxxing or incitement to violence. 

Of course, mistakes are also made. Moderation decisions are made by overworked, low-paid staff, who see the worst of humanity — death, sexual abuse, torture — and have to make instant judgments under time pressure. No surprise that some people are banned who shouldn’t be, or, on the flipside, that masses of harassing content slips through the net. 

Almost everyone accepts that platforms need some rules. Free speech absolutism is off the table. The challenge for all social platforms is where to draw the line and who should have the right to draw it. Will Elon Musk draw that line wisely and responsibly? And how many times will he be forced to redraw it as he faces the same old challenges?

Ultimately, though, a lot of what conservatives dislike about Twitter was never the platform, its leadership or its rules per se. It’s the people, the left-liberal lean of Twitter’s userbase. They don’t like feeling in a minority, mocked or dismissed for their views. If Musk brings a conservative influx back to Twitter, perhaps those people will finally feel at home, even without any major changes to content moderation. Or perhaps they just want someone to argue with. 

The Russian military, though, is huge and can afford the losses. They’re shelling Kharkiv and masses of tanks, artillery and rocket launchers are closing on Kyiv. Sooner or later, Russia will enter Ukraine’s big cities. Whether (and how) it holds them remains an open question, but they aren’t going home.

The rest of the word has imposed genuinely crippling sanctions on Russia, cutting off Russian banks, banning imports of many electronics and machine components, closing airspace, blocking flights and freezing assets.

Perhaps Putin will withdraw from Ukraine with his tail between his legs. Perhaps he’ll be removed from office through a quick coup, or suffer a mysterious and convenient heart attack of the sort previously reserved for his opponents.

None of these are the most likely scenario; he’ll probably hold on for a couple of years at least, fighting to occupy Ukraine, facing guerilla attacks and urban warfare and watching Russia’s economy suffocate under sanctions and isolation.

Once the ferocious battle for Ukraine is over, once it moves into an occupation phase, Putin’s top priority will be — will have to be — breaking the sanctions.

Some of that effort will be old-fashioned sanction-busting via smuggling, fake end-user licenses, and corruption. But that won’t be enough. To survive and keep Russia from becoming North Korea, Putin needs more than just busting sanctions. He needs to break them, remove them, end them.

And that means that Putin’s foreign, intelligence and security policy for the next few years will be devoted to destroying the anti-Russian bloc that has formed to oppose his invasion, by any means necessary.

That should be frightening, because we’ve already seen what Putin’s Russia has been willing to do so far, from hacking to influence campaigns to killing dissidents abroad. But that, potentially, is just the start. Countries applying sanctions to Russia should prepare for the worst.

Destabilization campaigns

On September 11, 2014, messages started to spread that ISIS had bombed the Columbian Chemicals Plant in Louisiana, sending a toxic cloud of chemicals into the air that threatened the residents of several states. The attack was reported in a local Facebook group, on Twitter, and there was even footage on YouTube. Local residents began receiving SMS messages warning them to stay indoors.

There was no such terror attack. The whole thing was a hoax of uncertain purpose — at the time. In 2015, the New York Times fingered the culprits, a little-known Russian project called the Internet Research Agency. Other hoaxes spread by the Agency included a supposed Ebola outbreak in the United States and a faked police shooting.

The Internet Research Agency is now most famous for its efforts to elect Donald Trump and smear Hillary Clinton, but throughout the US election campaign it also worked more generally to open up the fissures in American society.

In May 2016, the Agency organised two competing Houston rallies on Facebook: one from a front group called United Muslims of America urging the defence of a new Islamic centre, and the other from a Texan secessionist front group to “Stop the Islamization of Texas”. The rallies happened. People came.

There are dozens of examples. They established and controlled online groups like Blacktivist, Tea Party News, United Muslims of America, Back the Badge and Don’t Shoot Us, and used them to promote division and conflict.

Imagine these campaigns but in overdrive: better funded, better fronted, more credible, and in every country that backs sanctions on Russia, from the USA to Japan to Germany and Poland, stoking every ethnic and political tension, picking every healing scab of the past.

Yes, Russia’s been doing all of this already, using Russia Today, Sputnik, influence campaigns and more. A recent campaign tried to promote Covid anti-vaccine propaganda by paying influencers and buying Facebook ads, for example.

But the next few years could be more intense, more focused and nastier campaigns of misinformation, destabilization and division. It can always get worse.

Backing candidates and parties

The Internet Research Agency was best known for supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, through astroturfed online campaigns, local events, some paid targeted ads and other activities.

But of course, the Agency was only one small part of Russia’s campaign to elect Donald Trump. Much more significant was Russian intelligence’s operation to hack the DNC, DCCC and Clinton Campaign manager John Podesta. Releasing their stolen materials at key times hurt Clinton and boosted Trump, even though the contents of the emails themselves were largely innocuous.

Russia’s support for Trump, detailed in the hundreds of pages of the Mueller Report, also included corrupt relationships with senior Trump Campaign officials like Paul Manafort, and multiple offers to coordinate with the Campaign and feed them dirt on Clinton.

Russia’s best hope for breaking the sanctions is for Trump to be re-elected as President in 2024. His personal admiration for Putin, his antipathy for Ukraine, his hatred of the NATO alliance and his poor relationships with European leaders would make Trump the weakest link in the new alliance. So we shouldn’t be surprised if Russian efforts to boost Trump and damage his opponents restart as we approach the 2024 US Presidential election.

If Trump doesn’t run, or if he’s not a viable GOP candidate by 2024, Russia will back whoever Putin thinks will be the most divisive and least likely to maintain the sanctions. If Joe Biden doesn’t run for a second term, they’ll look to do the same with the Democrats. Remember, the Internet Research Agency also tried to promote both Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein in 2016 to undermine Clinton’s candidacy.

This sort of activity won’t be limited to the United States. We should expect Russian interference in the politics of every nation that opposes it.

That interference could be funding extremist parties on the Right or Left in those countries, or boosting extreme factions within more mainstream political parties.

It could be targeting leaders who back sanctions for hacking and smearing. Perhaps they’ll face mysterious accusations of past wrongdoing, with no real evidence but just enough stink to hurt them. Maybe it’ll be real: some 20-year-old love affair will be dug up from nowhere or politically damaging emails will emerge where they insult their colleagues.

Or it could be more drastic options too.

Assassinations and Coups

Putin’s Russia kills people.

Overseas assassinations are common in spy novels and movies, but the real thing was pretty rare until Putin declared open season on Russian dissidents. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London using tea poisoned with radioactive polonium wasn’t subtle. Nor was the attempted killing of Sergei Skripal using the Novichok nerve agent. Skripal survived; a woman who found the perfume bottle used to plant the poison was not so lucky.

Not every assassination was such a spectacle. Several Chechen rebels have met grizzly ends in Turkey, Germany and Austria at the hands of Russian contract killers.

And there are many more whose names don’t appear on the lists, the ones who fell out of windows (a remarkably common fate for critics of Russia everywhere) or died in unexplained circumstances.

Until now, though, Putin’s mostly restricted himself to killing Russian dissidents or Islamist terrorists.

That could change. A bullet to the head, a fall from a window or an unexplained heart attack might remove inconvenient political leaders and allow Russia-friendly rivals to replace them.

I’m not saying this will happen. But it’s something governments and intelligence agencies should be preparing for.

Relatedly, we should expect Russia-backed coup attempts, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2016, Russia was accused of backing a coup attempt against the government of Montenegro, which was then considering joining NATO. The case is still tied up in legal controversy, but it seems like something bad was planned and backed by the Kremlin.

Terrorism

One of the Soviet Union’s weapons against the West was terrorism, backing the Baader–Meinhof Group in Germany though the Stasi, the Red Brigades in Italy and various Palestinian terror groups that operated in Europe, hijacking airlines and carrying out bombings.

In recent decades, Russia has fought terrorism, being a target for Salafi-Jihadi groups and Chechen nationalist-Islamists. But if Putin decides to direct terror back to the West, he has options.

One possibility would be backing Far Right extremists in Europe and North America. These groups already exist and want to commit racial violence. With funding, encouragement and logistical support, they could carry out terror attacks.

Another, more remote option would be an alliance with Iran and Hezbollah. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah already fight alongside each other supporting Assad in Syria. The relationships exist. For now, their interests don’t overlap enough to make this a particularly likely possibility but even the thought is a troubling one.

Prepare for the worst

I don’t know which of these tactics Putin will choose in which countries and when. Sanctions should limit Russia’s ability to execute all the plans it wants to; operating abroad costs money and anyone linked to Russia will be under extra scrutiny.

But assuming Putin stays in power and doesn’t withdraw from Ukraine, everything Russia does will be about ending the sanctions by any means necessary. There aren’t going to be any rules.

We all need to be ready.

I’m leaving comments open to all on this article. If you think I’ve missed anything important, let me know below!

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Since Joe Biden became President, online MAGA spaces have been mostly devoted to Covid. Anti-vaccine propaganda, anti-mask activism, fantasies about murdering Dr Anthony Fauci, opposing largely nonexistent lockdowns and freaking out about the Great Reset have replaced most of what passed for political discourse on the populist Right. Even content about Trump, the 2020 election or Critical Race Theory came a very distant second to the constant Covid conspiracy doomposting.

This wasn’t restricted to angry memes. From mid-2020, direct action, violence and threats of violence have characterised the Covid conspiracy movement.

Armed militias menacing state capitols during debates, murders of staff who asked people to wear masks, death threats against public health officials and menacing the Cheesecake Factory, anger at Covid measures and mitigations has been the most consistent driver of political violence for the last 18 months.

These local actions never really crystalized into a unified movement, though, at least in the US.

Abroad, it played out a bit differently. In the UK, Covid protests took on a Sovereign Citizen flavour and targeted vaccination clinics and test centres with fake writs and disruptive sit-ins. And then, more recently, Canadian truck drivers decided to occupy Ottawa, ostensibly as a protest against a vaccination requirement for crossing the US-Canada border.

Perhaps because it’s close, or perhaps because truckers fill some romantic-cultural niche, an Old West fantasy of macho loners travelling quiet roads. MAGA world looked to Canada with excitement and envy. They followed every little move, calling Justin Trudeau a new Hitler, a Communist and the actual literal secret bastard child of Fidel Castro. They insisted the police would never move on the blockades, and then reacted angrily when they did. They insisted that Canada was now a police state, a new Nazi Germany, for reopening Ottawa’s roads. And they started wishing, dreaming and wondering “Why not us too?”

It took a surprisingly long time for plans for US trucker convoys to materialise. There were too many groups, too many agendas, too many egos and maybe too much money to be made. Initial discussions about disrupting the Superbowl went nowhere.

But last week something changed, and different groups began to settle on a date: Sunday March 6. That would be the target date for convoys to convene in the DC area.

So here we are.

Multiple convoys have different timetables and aims

There are loads of groups online — on Facebook, Telegram, Zello and other platforms — all talking about convoys. Small and big, local and national, organised and informal. Some of these groups won’t actually do anything. Some will or already have split as organisers disagree. Some have already set off for DC.

These groups have different aims, different targets and different motivations; so do the different participants within a single group. Some might be surprisingly fluffy, flying American flags and talking vaguely about freedom. Some are especially angry about masks, or vaccines, or the lockdowns of 2020 when Trump was still President. Some are there because they see it as a continuation of their MAGA identity activism. Some are QAnoners, with WWG1WGA emblazoned on their vehicles.

Some are truckers. A lot, probably the majority, are not. The trucks are big and photogenic, but we’ll probably see a lot of private cars too.

Some are only arriving in the DC area on or just before March 6. Some are claiming they’ll be there by tomorrow. Some are aiming for the State of the Union on March 1, leading DC authorities to request help from the National Guard. 400 unarmed DC Guardsman, and another 300 from other states, will be in the District to prepare for any disruption that the convoys might cause.

But even now it’s not clear if we’re talking about dozens of trucks and cars over a few weeks, or thousands all arriving in a short time. It’s not clear because plans are still being made, remade, cancelled and amended by local groups.

For example, a ‘convoy’ set off from Scranton, Pennsylvania on Wednesday consisting of just one big articulated truck.

The organiser hoped more would join him, but all he attracted were a few cars and America’s Flag Truck, a pickup covered in flags (including a QAnon flag) that has its own Facebook group for some reason.

After trying for hours, he want home. But perhaps he’ll be back in March.

Forget the convoys; what happens when they arrive?

They call themselves convoys, but the convoying is certainly the least relevant part of this whole thing. Yeah, they might cause major traffic jams, but traffic jams are common enough. They might bring out some supporters to wave flags at them and receive loud honks in return.

But the big question isn’t the convoys. It’s what happens when they stop being convoys; what happens when they arrive. Will they try to blockade all the roads into DC, as some have threatened? Will they enter the District proper? If so, what will they do there? Barricade the White House? Put hot tubs on the streets of Georgetown? Surround the DC Jail to demand the release of the January 6 prisoners?

These are contentious points in the online groups discussing convoys, and most of the bigger groups aren’t saying what happens once they arrive. That’s probably because they haven’t decided.

The biggest convoy group says it won’t enter DC

The biggest and best organised convoy group will probably be the Peoples’ Convoy. It’s lashed up with antivaxxers like Robert F Kennedy Jr’s group, and its leaders have appeared on Fox News. The People’s Convoy left California on Wednesday consisting of a few hundred vehicles total, of which maybe a couple of dozen are articulated trucks (though there are lots of pickups).

The AZ Right Wing Watch Twitter has been following this convoy, which has the Trumpist OAN and NTD channels participating too.

Many of the trucks appear to be sponsored and decorated by campaign groups or candidates, and others are daubed in QAnon slogans.

The convoy is taking on masses of supplies as it stops. At each stop, local supporters massively swell the numbers as they cheer the convoyers on.

Organisers of the People’s Convoy have repeatedly stressed that they have no plans to enter DC:

The People’s Convoy will abide by agreements with local authorities, and terminate in the vicinity of the DC area, but will NOT be going into DC proper.

But I think that’s a way of keeping the organisers clean legally. They’ll bring them to the gates and then wash their hands of them. By the time they arrive in the DC area, participants will have had plenty of time to make plans.

They aren’t expecting a friendly welcome

On January 6, Trump supporters flooded to DC expecting to be heroes. I wrote recently:

There would be riots when Pence threw out all the Biden votes and Trump won. So perhaps that’s why he wanted his people in DC, to protect the city from “Antifa and BLM rioters”.

Or perhaps they were supposed to be Macris’s militia, there to help the military arrest the traitors in Congress and fire the first shots of the Second American Civil War.

Either way, he must be calling them to DC for a reason. Something important. A job. Of course he’d want them to be armed because it’d probably involve fighting. It might be dangerous, though, too. Battles are never bloodless.

This time, it’s different. The convoy backers know they won’t be facing a friendly welcome in Washington. They no longer see the various DC police forces as allies, and don’t expect to be shoulder to shoulder with the National Guard.

The difference in tone among the various online convoy groups is stark. Only the most extreme minority are talking about taking weapons and pitched battles. And part of that is because…

Many potential participants think it’s a trap

As soon as convoy-planning groups formed, some members thought the whole thing was a Deep State trap to lure ‘patriots’ to DC and arrest them. Many of them, of course, believe that January 6 was just such a trap too.

That paranoia only stepped up a gear after Canada arrested the truck protest leaders and dismantled the barricades. Fearmongering around the Canadian reaction (“it’s like the Nazis, the UN is involved, he’s a dictator now, New World Order”) spilled over into the US convoy hivemind. What if Biden does the same and uses the truckers to turn the USA into a communist dictatorship like Trudeau did?

So there’s a lot of nerves.

There’s not much authorities can do unless they break laws

Facebook isn’t shutting down convoy groups. The FBI isn’t arresting leaders. Payment platforms aren’t kicking out their fundraisers.

And that’s because these convoys aren’t doing anything illegal —yet. The People’s Convoy is rushing around telling everyone how much it isn’t going to break any laws.

That doesn’t mean that they won’t end up on the wrong side of the law, if they do try to block roads or harass people etc. But for now, people are allowed to drive around with dumb signs looking dumb, even if they’ve got six weeks of food rations with them.

They probably won’t be popular

The Canadian trucker protest was unpopular; polls consistently showed a solid majority of the public opposed both the message and the tactics. The Canadian government took a popularity hit for seeming weak, allowing it to go on so long.

In the US, opinion is always more partisan. I’m sure some of the GOP will try to hug the truckers close, and we’ll see a parade of Congress members lining up to address them. But most people support Covid vaccinations (most people have had Covid vaccinations) and aren’t militant coronaskeptics. The convoys can try to sell broader messages against mandates or masks, but the loudest people are also the most extreme. These are antivax convoys. There’s no reason for them, or us, to pretend otherwise.

Ukraine may change the agenda

Like I said at the start, it felt wrong to be finishing this article today. Russia invaded its neighbour with a massive force after Putin pretty much vowed to wipe Ukraine off the map altogether.

Perhaps the Ukraine crisis will mean nobody will notice the convoys, a piddling domestic story of little import. Or perhaps they’ll readjust: a number of the trucks I saw mentioned gasoline prices as another thing they’re angry about, and the Ukraine crisis will likely drive gas prices higher. The irony of driving across the country to protest the price of fuel is hard to miss.

It all depends on how many people join, how long they’re willing to stay and what they plan to do when they arrive. And right now, even though there are trucks already en route, nobody knows the answers to those questions. Including the participants themselves.

Particular thanks to Sara Aniano and AZ Right Wing Watch whose research into the convoy movement heavily informed this piece

In today’s world where everyone likes to assume bad faith and jump to incomplete conclusions, sometimes it’s worth stating your premises at the top, so to be clear:

• Covid-19 is a highly infectious disease that has killed several million people

• Vaccinations significantly reduce the risk of severe Covid-19, especially in people who have never caught the virus

• I have had three doses of the Pfizer vaccine myself

• I wear a mask indoors in public places, and think masks help prevent the transmission of the virus.

• I think lockdowns and other restrictions may, at times, be the appropriate policy response to a virus pandemic wave, as they were in 2020.

OK, now that’s all out the way, we can begin.

Ivermectin and the cure for the common cold

A few days ago I highlighted how Reuters misunderstood a press release on Ivermectin.

The details aren’t really important. Basically, a Japanese pharma company announced that Ivermectin retained antiviral properties against the Omicron variant in a test tube.

We’ve known all along that it had such properties against the other variants of the coronavirus — that’s why, a year and a half ago, people thought it might help with Covid. Research so far has NOT found any antiviral effect on the coronavirus in humans, and this press release didn’t say that it had.

But because Kowa, the pharmaceutical company, is also conducting a large human trial of Ivermectin for Covid, Reuters (with the help of a confusing press release and bad translation from Japanese) garbled the two issues and reported, briefly, that Ivermectin helps with Covid in humans. It quickly corrected the story, but the damage is done.

My little thread explaining this was deluged with people conspiracy theorists claiming Reuters tried to bury the story because they’re controlled by Pfizer. On the flipside, some claimed the opposite: actually Reuters, following its merger with Russian wire service TASS, was deliberately spreading antivax propaganda on behalf of Vladimir Putin. But that’s all standard noise.

What stood out to me was a lot of personal testimonies from Ivermectin users, both vaccinated and unvaccinated. The typical reply went something like this:

“Why are you saying Ivermectin doesn’t work? I got Covid and I took Ivermectin and I felt fine after about five days. It’s a miracle cure!

There’s an old saying about the common cold: If you take all the cold medicines and treatments, you'll recover in seven days. If not, you'll get better in a week. People often take some pill or alternative medicine treatment when they have a cold, and then naturally attribute their recovery to the pill and not just natural recovery.

But Covid isn’t a common cold, and people aren’t taking Ivermectin because they think it’ll shave a few hours off of their recovery. They’re taking Ivermectin because they’re scared that they’re going to die or be critically ill. When they have a regular week of mild Covid, they feel like they’ve been saved.

Covid is not a death sentence

Most people who catch the coronavirus don’t die.

Unlike its close relative SARS, the vast majority of Covid infections don’t need to be hospitalised or require any medical treatments at all. This was true before there were vaccines and it remains true of unvaccinated people.

That should be an uncontroversial statement, but the public consistently over-estimates how dangerous Covid-19 is to the average person.

A Gallup poll in August 2021 asked Americans how likely they thought it was that an unvaccinated person who caught Covid-19 would need to be hospitalised.

41% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans said that an unvaccinated person who caught Covid would probably end up in hospital! And there were lots of in-between estimates too.

The truth is that less than 1% of unvaccinated people (and even fewer vaccinated people) who catch Covid are hospitalised.

That “less than 1%” can still be a very large number of people if the virus is spreading fast, enough to overwhelm a health system. And of course, for older age groups, the risk is much much higher than for younger people. Still, the public’s sense of the personal risks of catching Covid is wildly out of step with reality.

Some of this is because people are really bad at estimating personal risk, conflating absolute risk and relative risk. As Dr Ben Goldacre wrote:

Let’s say the risk of having a heart attack in your 50s is 50% higher if you have high cholesterol: that sounds pretty bad.

Let’s say the extra risk of having a heart attack if you have high cholesterol is only 2%. That sounds OK to me.

But they’re both talking about the same (hypothetical) figures. Out of a hundred men in their 50s with normal cholesterol, four will be expected to have a heart attack; whereas out of 100 men with high cholesterol, six will be expected to have a heart attack. That’s two extra heart attacks.

Throughout this pandemic, most people’s individual risk of severe disease or death has remained low. Many risks are collective, not individual: the risk to the very elderly and immunocompromised; the risk to hospitals overwhelmed with Covid patients who, even if they mostly recover, fill beds that other critically ill people need; the risk to a functioning society of having millions of people all sick at the same time. These are huge, real, dangers that risk the lives of millions.

There’s a sense that it’s hard to ‘sell’ collective risk, and that people respond selfishly more to personal risk. Perhaps because of that, there’s been a tendency in discourse to stress — overstress — the personal risk of Covid infection instead.

Don’t Fear the Reaper

Remember the Florida Grim Reaper?

In spring 2020, a local lawyer dressed as the reaper of souls stalked the beaches of Florida, telling the mostly young bathers that death would surely follow them for sunbathing instead of staying home.

This kind of stunt was certainly visually striking, its core message was that the beach was a major Covid risk, and the bathers were taking their lives in their hands. This was never true, of course. Well-spaced, outdoors, fully open beaches without large crowded gatherings were probably one of the safest places a person could be — perhaps safer than a poorly-ventilated apartment where there’s some risk of transmission to neighbours via airflow in the corridors.

Did the Florida Grim Reaper really, literally think the beachgoers were facing imminent death? Probably not, because just a couple of weeks later he himself joined the (also outdoor) protests following the death of George Floyd. This suggests rather strongly that he knew he wasn’t being literal when he donned his costume and made headlines worldwide. He was deploying hyperbole, drama, emotive exaggeration. He was communicating something that he thought was true in some sense, but not literally true.

I think this type of communication has been common over the last two years, well-meaning people overstating the very real risks of Covid-19 in the belief that doing so will keep people safe.

A couple of days ago, I saw a Facebook post about an unvaccinated man in his 30s had just died of Covid-19. One woman commented “well I’m unvaccinated, I just had Covid and I was fine.”

Obviously, this is a horrible response to another person’s death. But several replies to challenged her for a different reason. “You got lucky!” was a common phrase used.

The thing is, it’s not true. A younger person who catches the coronavirus isn’t lucky if they don’t die. They’re unlucky if they do.

Now, most of us don’t want to die or be hospitalized with Covid-19, so getting a free, safe vaccine to reduce the chances of severe disease and death makes good personal sense. But misrepresenting the individual risks of the virus doesn’t lead people to informed decisions; it tries to scare them That can have bad consequences down the line.

Behind the Masks

Something similar happened with masks.

Widespread public masking cuts down on infected people unknowingly spreading the virus to others. Individual masking also protects the mask-wearer from catching the virus. A CDC study, just pre-published, showed that people who report always wearing a mask indoors have a lower chance of testing positive.

Note that this study suggests a surgical mask is 66% protective, and a cloth mask is lower at 56%.

I’m in Israel, where indoor public masking was mandated early and maintained for most of the last 20 months despite lax enforcement. Some people like them, some people don’t but there’s no politics about it.

In the US, masks became a political shibboleth that defined which tribe you were in.

Anti-maskers insisted that masks cause Covid, or hypoxia, or give you parasites. They claimed that governments know that masks do nothing and governments only imposed them to dehumanise people and prepare them for intense social control measures. They refused to obey mask mandates, and in a few cases even murdered shop staff who asked them to follow the rules

Perhaps in response to this insanity (though very much not equal to it at all), a lot of people began overstating the effectiveness of masks. 66% for surgical masks is pretty good; it means if 15 people in 100 would have got Covid without masks, only 5 in 100 got it while wearing them. But the way people talked about masks for much of the pandemic made them sound like magic. Underneath every Twitter report of a vaccinated person testing positive for the virus would be 50 replies asking angrily “Was he wearing a mask?” as if no masked person could possibly get Covid.

A Lesson from the Garden of Eden

Midrash is an ancient Jewish technique for telling stories about the Bible. Midrash comes to fill in gaps, whether major gaps in the narrative or tiny inconsistencies in phrasing in a biblical verse. Sometimes they’re sprawling fanfic-types, like the Midrashic stories of Abraham’s youth . Sometimes they’re minor but striking additions, like the claim that Queen Vashti of Persia sprouted a tail. They aren’t always internally consistent — fanfic is a better comparison here than ‘canon’, pretty much by definition. Midrashim were popular enough that some found their way into the Quran.

A well-known midrash about the Garden of Eden starts with an observation about the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. When God introduces Adam to Eden, he tells him:

Genesis 2:16-17 “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.”

Later, though, when the woman (not yet named Eve) talks to the snake, she says:

Genesis 3:2-3 “We may eat of the fruit of the other trees of the garden It is only about fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said: ‘You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die.’”

Ancient Jewish readers noticed the inconsistency in the language. How did God’s warning to Adam not to eat from the tree become Eve’s claim to the snake that it would be death to even touch it? The midrash explains:

(Avot d’Rabi Natan 1:5) Adam the first person did not want to tell Eve in same the way that God had told him. Instead, he said this to her (thus making a fence around his words, saying more than what God had said to him): “God said not to eat from the tree that is in the midst of the garden, nor to touch it, lest you die.” He wanted to keep himself and Eve from even touching the tree.

This midrash explains the discrepancy by saying Adam wanted to make extra-sure that Eve wouldn’t eat from the tree, so he invented an additional warning: even touching it would kill you. That’d do it! Another midrash source completes the tale.

(Genesis Rabbah 2:3) When the serpent saw her exaggerating in this manner, he grabbed her and pushed her against the tree. "So, have you died?" he asked her. "Just as you were not stricken when you touched it, so will you not die when you eat from it."

The compilers of these Midrashim, Jewish religious legislators of the Roman and early medieval period, used them to give a warning about exaggerating when it comes to safety rules. If you overstate the risks, people will come to distrust and ignore the real danger you were trying to avert.

Fences around Covid-19

That’s where we are right now when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic. Partly out of an attempt to build a fence around the coronavirus, we’ve ended up with a mainstream discourse that tends to overstate the real individual risks of Covid on the one hand and over-promise on the effectiveness of mitigation measures like masks on the other.

So, alongside hardcore antivaxxers, we saw young adults refusing to get vaccinated because “my friends had Covid and they were fine, so why should I?”

We see people who were scared of vaccines but more scared of Covid, downing hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin and even their own urine in a desperate attempt to save their lives. And then we hear those same people praise the pill or the pee as a miracle cure that kept them out of the ICU. “See, they told me I’d die without a vaccine, but all it took was drinking bleach!”

For young healthy people, the main risks from Covid are social, not personal. They’re the risks the virus poses to parents and grandparents, and the vulnerable and immunocompromised. They’re the risks it poses to the healthcare system as hospital beds fill up, delaying cancer screenings and other early detections of deadly diseases.

They’re the risks of school closures not due to government-imposed restrictions but because too many teachers are home sick with Covid, as happened in Missouri in January. Or of global supply chain disruptions leading to goods shortages and inflation.

And yes, the small but real individual risks of severe disease and death are in there too. So’s Long Covid.

Omicron is so infectious that many countries are running out of coronavirus-naïve adults. We’re very close to the point where nearly everyone has either been vaccinated or has had Covid or, in many cases, both.

As the virus moves from pandemic to endemic, we’re all going to have to adapt to a world where we can’t avoid it anymore, whether at the office or on public transport or at in-person school. The real fences we erected around the virus are coming down. Maybe they’ve been down for some time.

So perhaps it’s even more important to take down the fences around our words. Covid poses large dangers to the elderly, the immunocompromised and society as a whole. It poses much smaller personal danger to young, healthy people. Vaccination reduces that danger even lower.

Trying to scare people into responsible behaviour over Covid has its limits, and it’s reached them. Cutting the well-meaning hyperbole is the best path to helping people make informed decisions about their health and their duty.

Oh, and get vaccinated if you haven’t. Your kids too. Covid isn’t going away ever. That’s what endemic means. Yes, your kids will probably be fine without it. But mostly parents aim for more than ‘probably fine’. Car seats, sleep safety, food safety, toy safety… probably fine without any of them. But why take the risk when you don’t need to?

In November I wrote a spotters’ guide to Covid conspiracy theorists:

The Hat Tip

Covid Conspiracy theorists: A spotters' guide

There’s a natural tendency to throw everyone who has… unconventional beliefs about Covid into the same basket: antivaxxers, Covid deniers, Covidiots. But this lazy grouping makes it harder to separate the convinceable from the hardliners, the irrational from the incorrect but reasonable. There’s a difference between someone who thinks Covid is caused by…

Read more

5 years ago · 3 likes · 10 comments · Arieh Kovler

Thanks for reading. As people might have something to say about this one, I’m opening comments for all.

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A Charmed Life

I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson.

Well, that’s not really true. I quite enjoyed him as the guest host of comedy quiz Have I Got News For You, where he was good for a laugh. But I’ve never rated his qualities as a leader.

Johnson has led a charmed political life, in the old-fashioned sense: it seems like he’s been under some sort of magical protection, exempt from the normal rules of politics and consequences.

For example, in 1990, Johnson gave criminal Darius Guppy the private details of a fellow journalist, Stuart Collier, who Guppy was planning to have beaten to scare him off a story.

Guppy: I am telling you something, Boris. This guy has got my blood up, alright? And there is nothing which I won’t do to get my revenge. It’s as simple as that.
Johnson: How badly are you going to hurt this guy?
Guppy: Not badly at all.
Johnson: I really, I want to know …
Guppy: Look, let me explain to you…
Johnson: If this guy sues me I will be fucking furious.
Guppy: I guarantee you he will not be seriously hurt.
Johnson: How badly will he …
Guppy: He will not have a broken limb or broken arm, he will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a… a cracked rib or something.
Johnson: Cracked rib?
Guppy: Nothing which you didn’t suffer at rugby, OK? But he’ll get scared and that’s what I want … I want him to get scared, I want him to have no idea who’s behind it, OK?
Johnson: If I get trouble, if I get…
Guppy: You will not, Boris. I swear to you. If you…
Johnson: I got this bloody number for you. OK, Darrie. I said I’d do it. I’ll do it. Don’t worry.

Despite an actual audio recording of this conversation being published, Boris survived. He survived two divorces, and multiple affairs that resulted in an unknown number of children (probably at least eight, but he refuses to confirm a total).

When the leading Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, Nick Boles, was diagnosed with cancer and withdrew, Johnson’s name was suggested as an alternative, but he didn’t confirm he was running until just a few hours before the deadline. His two terms as mayor gave him an international platform.

He also kept quiet about the biggest issue of the day, the upcoming referendum on the UK leaving the European Union, eventually revealing his position in a paid column in the Telegraph newspaper. Reportedly, he wrote two articles — one in favour of leaving the EU, and one against — and only decided which to use at the last minute. But that was all it took for him to become one of the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign.

Sure, there were occasional upsets, like his shock withdrawal from the Conservative leadership election in 2016, but his charmed life continued. Theresa May made him Foreign Secretary, a position he had no right to expect or receive under her leadership. Later, he resigned from that job in order to challenge her Brexit deal, eventually replacing her as prime minister, negotiating a worse deal and quickly heading to an election in which he won a huge majority.

And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, causing a crisis that also obscured any economic fallout from Brexit as well as killing more than 153,000 Britons. Despite some pretty bad mistakes, like delaying a Spring 2020 lockdown (on scientific advice) and delaying winter 2020 restrictions (against the scientists’ recommendations). But the Johnson government remained overall popular.

The last few weeks have changed all that. Labour is ahead in the polls and support for Boris Johnson’s Conservative party is plunging.

Parties

When the UK did eventually go into a lockdown in spring 2020, it was extremely strict. Mixing between households was banned for months, even outdoors. But there was at least a sense that everyone was in it together.

The various revelations about different work parties and drinks gatherings held in Downing Street over the last two years, emerging steadily over the last few weeks, have left the public feeling betrayed.

Heartbreaking stories of parents who were banned from seeing dying children in their last days, people fined thousands of pounds for talking to a friend in a park, people who missed out on life milestones — the anger that the people running the country were able to drink wine and congregate in the garden of Ten Downing Street during the strictest lockdowns.

Downing Street isn’t like the White House. Most of the staff in Number Ten aren’t political appointees; they’re independent civil servants, working for whatever government is in power. The people relaxing after work had been trying to manage the whole country through a once-in-a-generation pandemic. I have some sympathy for them. But the contrast with how the rest of the country struggled is stark.

Boris Johnson wasn’t at all of these parties, though he attended at least one (he claims he “didn’t know it was a party"), but they happened under his leadership in his office/residence. He repeatedly denied ever attending a party, announced investigations, denied some more and eventually apologised when photographs of the evening reception were leaked. But even this has led to absurdities, like Johnson unable to answer basic questions about what he said and did, saying instead that the inquiry will determine it.

Things have gotten so bad so fast that parts of the Conservative Party are considering ousting Johnson altogether, replacing him with a fresh, more popular leader.

No Johnsonites

Thatcher had the Thatcherites, Blair the Blairites, Brown the Brownites and Cameron the Cameroonies; hardcore ideological allies who are loyal to their leader and support their political project.

There aren’t really any Johnsonites. Not in the same way.

I used to go to the annual political party conferences in the late 2000s. At the Tory Party conference, the biggest single event by far was Boris Johnson’s speech. Bigger than leader David Cameron, there’d be queues round the block to get into the auditorium as Johnson delivered a vaguely political 45-minute stand-up comedy routine. Some Latin, a digression into the history of table tennis, and one or two sexual innuendos were enough to bring the house down. Boris was a superstar. The party base loved him.

That popularity didn’t extend to his colleagues. In City Hall, Johnson ended up recruiting a cadre partly of hard-working technocrats and partly from former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which had rebranded itself as the contrarianist Right-Libertarian Spiked Magazine. When he entered Downing Street, he borrowed the leadership of Vote Leave, the Brexit campaign group, to run his operation.

Everyone had their own idea of what Boris Johnson stood for. The hardcore Brexiters supported him as leader because they thought he was their best hope at securing the most dramatic breaks possible with the European Union. The moderate Brexiters backed him because they believed the opposite: that Johnson would secure a more palatable compromise than other potential leaders. Traditionalists saw a traditionalist. Reformers saw a reformer. And they all saw a figure who could be moulded, could be convinced and could gain masses of seats at a general election

In 2019, he proved that last point true, turning a minority government into a solid 80-seat majority and winning a lot of traditional Labour seats in northern England. The election, which he fought on Brexit and opposition to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, should have left him in an unassailable position, with the first durable Conservative majority since Thatcher’s 1987 re-election. As recently as this September, headlines promised “another decade in power”.

But now he’s become a political liability, his allies have mostly vanished. His support was very broad but never deep. The different factions see a future in which another leader will be better at getting them what they want.

To an extent, the same was true of his predecessor, Theresa May. She was also massively popular, ahead in the polls, supported by a coalition of internal party interests who each thought she was the lesser evil. When she crashed and burned during the 2017 election campaign, her popularity evaporated and her allies with it.

The Dam Bursts

The party stories have broken the Boris spell. Suddenly, things that would have been minor inconveniences just a few weeks ago are becoming full crises. Here are a few from just the last month or so:

• The recent resignation of key Brexit advisor Lord Frost. Frost cited a laundry list of grievances with the government: Covid restrictions, economic policy etc, but it was widely understood that he quit because he wasn’t allowed to pursue his strategy of threatening the European Union.

• The saga of who paid to refurbish Boris Johnson’s flat ended in a report that didn’t exactly clear or condemn him, but there has since been new evidence that undermines his story.

• Accusations that Conservative whips threatened to cut public funding to projects in MPs’ constituencies unless they voted the right way.

• A claim by former minister Nusrat Ghani that she was told her sacking from the government was partly because her Muslim religion made other ministers uncomfortable

• A defection by Bury South MP Christian Wakeford from the Conservative Party to Labour, the first defection from one major party to another since 2007.

Any day now, the internal investigation into the Downing Street parties could put Johnson in a position where more of his own side will be demanding his resignation.

Will Boris survive?

In times of crisis, parties retreat to their comfort zones. For Labour, this is usually the National Health Service. For today’s Tories, it’s become the culture war. Immigration, loony judges, Europe, human rights legislation, trans issues, ‘anti-wokeness’, defending old statues and the other firm favorites of the global Right. Already the government is making noises that it’s going to push these issues which they see as wedge issues, dividing public opinion in their favour.

The Conservative Party isn’t the Republican Party. The median Tory MP believes in climate change and supports Covid vaccinations, two of the biggest touchstone issues of conservative populism, There will always be room for a Nigel Farage-type party to their right, sucking up populist votes while becoming culture warriors alienates middle-class suburban voters.

And, from the Tories’ point of view, there’s no great rush. The upcoming May 2022 elections are for local roles only. Their parliamentary majority isn’t going anywhere. Waiting until 2023 to reassess the leadership question is a perfectly viable strategy for the Tories. The pandemic will probably be largely over, and the oncoming economic tsunami will probably have hit and maybe be receding.

The party’s had a lot of success replacing an old leader with a fresh face and then claiming they’re a brand new government, from Cameron to May to Johnson. No reason the trick can’t work again.

But if Boris Johnson’s Teflon coating has finally chipped off, then more and more scandal, mismanagement and internal party discontent is going to start to stick to him. The two leading contenders to replace him, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, risk being tainted themselves the longer they stay as senior members of his team. A vacancy now would suit them just fine.

The next week or two, when Sue Gray’s report into the parties is published, will be the time of maximum danger for Johnson.

He really might be forced out, whether via a confidence vote of his own MPs or a resignation under pressure. Or he might dig in, win a confidence challenge and pivot to a messy culture war.

Either way, British politics is interesting again.

This is the last in a series of three articles I’m writing about the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t eat or drink from sunrise until the evening, marking the fast of the Tenth of Tevet. The Tenth of Tevet is one of the four annual fasts in the Jewish calendar that commemorate and mourn the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem 2,600 years ago.

I’m not a Christian, but I felt that same sense of sadness, of waste, of the profanation of the sacred on April 15 2019 as Notre-Dame de Paris burned on its island in the Seine. The feeling that something special, holy and irreplaceable was being destroyed.

It took me a while to recognise that same emotion in myself as I watched rioters flood into the Capitol building on January 6. Something was being desecrated, defiled. Perhaps it could be rebuilt, but it would never be the same.

We’re used to a binary division: Inside the corridors of power, grandiosity and calm, pomp and comity. Outside, the anger and frustration of raw political will.

Politics is the process by which we transform and translate the passions of the streets into policy, stability and governance. Organisation, campaigning, political parties, committees, votes — these are how we take the raw material of popular will and refine it into useful outputs.

On January 6, the walls burst. The binary was broken. Politics failed, and the tide of the mob rose until it flooded the island.

It seemed wrong, like watching a historical drama when suddenly there’s an alien invasion. These genres don’t mix. These two expressions are both real, but they shouldn’t share the same space.

The Paradox of Democracy

There’s a concept in political philosophy called the Paradox of Democracy, and it goes some thing like this:

We all have political desires. We want the government to behave in certain ways. Maybe a libertarian conservative wants small government, low taxes, no welfare and an open immigration policy, while an old-school left-leaning union type wants broader welfare, higher taxes on the rich, a more developed state infrastructure and labour protectionism in immigration.

Many people also consider themselves ‘democrats’. They believe that governments should be chosen, directly or indirectly, by the people and that on some level the will of the majority should rule.

To be a democrat is to hold two contradictory desires in your head. On the one hand, I want the government to do the things I believe in. On the other hand, I want a government that’s chosen by the majority and does the things that the majority voted for, even if they’re the opposite of what I believe in.

That’s why democracy is hard. Sometimes it means losing, and then accepting that losing means the other side wins. A commitment to democracy means wanting things you don’t want.

Democracy breaks down when enough people don’t accept that they can lose, and don’t accept that if they do lose, the winners get to be in charge.

For the months before — and the weeks after — the 2020 election, millions of Republicans, led by Donald Trump, refused to accept that losing was possible. Of course their will was the true will of the people. Seven million more people voted for Biden than for Trump, but that didn’t matter. Biden won 74 more votes in the Electoral College, but that could only be fraud. They never had to face the paradox of democracy, because they just rejected a premise: the idea that more people could support the other guy.

A year later, a sizeable minority of the American public still hasn’t had a reckoning with itself. “Election fraud” lies mean never having to accept that the other side is more popular and gained more backing, never having to grapple with democracy itself. It also means never having to reflect on how to modify your message. The message is fine: it’s the system’s fault that Biden won. So they’re focusing on changing that system.

Undermining elections

Republicans have responded to the 2020 defeat by making it harder to vote, on the theory that such barriers will help them:

Four states, Georgia, Iowa, Florida and Texas, all passed sweeping, omnibus election bills with long lists of new and more stringent restrictions. Seven states imposed harsher voter ID requirements, while seven states shrunk the time frame for requesting mail ballots. Four states limited the use of mail ballot drop boxes, and seven states made it easier for citizens to be purged from the voter rolls. 

But it doesn’t stop at access to voting; they’re also taking political control of the election apparatus itself, to make it easier for state legislatures, often heavily-gerrymandered, to throw out results that they don’t like.

And multimillionaire QAnon promoter Patrick Byrne, who sat in the Oval Office in December 2020 begging Trump to launch military coup, is working with other QAnon influencers and Republican candidates to install state Secretaries of State who will be willing to overturn Presidential elections in their states. Nevada Secretary of State candidate Jim Marchant told a QAnon conference in October:

I can’t stress enough how important the Secretary of State offices are. I think they are the most important elections in our country in 2022. And why is that? We control the election system.

And, of course, Republicans have now accepted the principle that Congress can throw out Presidential electoral votes at will. If Biden is narrowly re-elected in 2024 but the Republicans control the House of Representatives, it’s not hard to imagine what will happen.

The legacy of January 6

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked a lot on the media whether I think there will be another outbreak of mass mob violence like we saw on January 6.

I’ve always said no. The confluence of events that created the Capitol riot was unique: first and foremost, Donald Trump was president. He summoned his supporters. He spent months stoking the narrative that he was about to overturn the election.

The next question I’m asked is usually “so where will there be violence?” and the answer to that one is obvious, because it was happening before January 6 and has continued since: violence against mask mandates, vaccination centres, public health staff and anyone (especially school boards and state legislators) who try to manage the pandemic. And, as this year’s mid-terms approach, election administrators might also be targets.

But it’s the wrong question.

The shocking thing about the Capitol riot wasn’t the violence. It wasn’t that the rioters came to D.C., and it wasn’t that they stormed the Capitol.

The shocking thing about January 6 was that, when the Joint Session restarted a few hours after the riot, 139 Republican members of Congress — 65% of the House GOP Caucus — still voted to overturn the election results. The carnage of that day didn’t deter them and it didn’t wake them up; it succeeded.

That success continues to reverberate. Republicans who admit that the 2020 election was free and fair are shunned by the party. Fox News, which briefly returned to sanity after the election, is now back pushing the Big Lie too. One party in the United States’ two-party system has decided that it doesn’t matter how the people voted; the only thing that matters is power. One party gave up on democracy.

One way or another, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024, whether literally or figuratively. If Trump himself doesn’t run again, a spiritual successor like Ron DeSantis will.

It’s quite possible that the 2020 was the last free and fair Presidential election in America. If a Democrat wins in 2024, there will be immense pressure at every level of the Republican party to throw out the votes and install a Republican instead.

And the GOP can win the 2024 Presidential election without having to cheat. The Electoral College gives the Republican Party enough of an advantage that they can win 306 Electoral Votes with 3 million fewer voters, as happened in 2016. They can win without voter suppression, without disqualifying Democratic votes or ignoring the result at statehouses or in Congress. They can win by… winning.

Ironically, then, 2024’s best hope of being a free and fair election is if Trump or a Trumpalike wins it, because then they won’t have to overturn it. But if that happens, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope for a free and fair election in 2028.

Missed Chances and the Ongoing Coup

For almost 500 years, the Roman Republic was led by a Senate as its most important deliberative body. After the rise of the Caesars, the Senate didn't go away; on paper, the Imperial Senate was even more powerful than it was during the Republic. It was more decorative than authoritative. It usually did what it was told and real power resided in the Emperor. But it remained a potent symbol, a body people aspired to join.

Even after the Western Roman Empire fell after another 500 years, the Roman Senate continued to exist, surviving a whole century longer than the Empire it purported to rule. The forms and structures of institutions can survive long after those same institutions have become hollow and empty.

Congress in the Trump years became hollow too. Subpoenas ignored, Executive confirmation abolished in place of constant ‘acting’ officials, the power of the purse overruled using emergency powers, even the ultimate sanction, impeachment, happening without hearing trial witnesses because witnesses might have proved he was guilty. Biden’s victory was an opportunity to put things right and constrain the near-omnipotent imperial presidency.

That agenda, though, has disappeared without a trace, and attempts defend elections and the transition of power have failed to overcome Republican filibuster in the Senate.

The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021 never left. It’s still there. It’s there in the rejection of democracy and the idea that power makes right. It’s there in the fear, at all levels of the Republican party, to admit in public that Joe Biden won fair and square. It’s there in the giddy willingness to overturn democratic elections in the future.

The United States of America was given a glimpse of a future without democracy on January 6. It was given a chance to change. Everyone, especially the Republican Party, passed up that chance.

What comes next won’t be good.

I hope that the gloomy message of this article is wrong. I hope I’m too pessimistic. And maybe I’ll feel differently in a few days. But this is where my head is, and I didn’t want to try and sugar-coat it.

The previous articles in this series:

1. From Election Day to Jan 6: Inside the MAGA Mind

2. It could have been so much worse: America got lucky on Jan 6

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The assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was, of course, a disaster. Hundreds injured, several deaths, damage, the transfer of power disrupted as the Joint Session of Congress to count the Electoral votes was suspended for hours. National trauma and international humiliation.

But it could have been a lot worse.

Some of the scenarios that follow are were a little unlikely, but I think some were actually more probable paths than the path history ultimately followed that day. All of them are at least plausible. On January 6, America got lucky.

They could have taken (or killed) hostages

The Capitol invaders came very close to capturing Members of Congress. Officer Eugene Goodman helped rush Mitt Romney to safety as one mob of rioters closed on the Senate. Romney was particularly despised by Trump’s supporters for his vote in favour of impeachment.

Goodman then drew the mob away from the doors to the Senate chamber, baiting them into following him upstairs and away from the Senators who had just begun to flee the room. Had the mob arrived just a couple of minutes earlier, they would also have run into Mike Pence with his small Secret Service detail.

Elsewhere, about half an hour later, another mob was besieging the House of Representatives. House members, journalists and others were trapped in the chamber. At a battle to enter the Speaker’s Lobby, which contains entrances to the House chamber itself, rioters broke the windows and started to climb through. The first rioter to attempt to get through the window, Ashli Babbitt, was shot by Capitol police. She later died.

If Officer Goodman had been assigned to a different post that day. If the mob had been a minute or two earlier to the Senate. If the House had been breached. If any of the smaller mobs had found lone Members of Congress taking shelter in offices or bathrooms. If any number of things had gone just a tiny bit differently, the Capitol invaders would have come face-to-face with their enemy: the Democrats, the RINOs or the newly-hated Mike Pence.

There’s a good chance that, faced with the true enemy, they’d have attacked. Maybe that attack would have been a beating — and a mob beating can quickly escalate into a lynching. But maybe they would have taken hostages.

It should be obvious that a hostage situation would have been a disaster. There are no demands that the mob had that could possibly be met by negotiators, and the hostage Congressmen wouldn’t, in their eyes, be innocent bargaining collateral but rather people deserving of punishment themselves. The mob itself consisted of unstable, desperate, angry and unpredictable people who would have struggled to stay unified.

A hostage situation on January 6 would only have ended in blood. Maybe the blood of the hostage-takers as FBI SWAT teams moved in; maybe the blood of Senators, Members and journalists as the hostage-takers started killing; most likely, both. The Joint Session would not have recommenced that evening, and the transition of power would have been disrupted even longer.

And it’s quite possible that Trump would have taken this opportunity to take personal control of the D.C. National Guard and invoke the Insurrection Act under the guise of restoring order, taking the country into dangerous territory.

They could have destroyed the Electoral Vote envelopes

While fleeing the Senate as the invaders approached, staff from the Parliamentarian’s Office had the time and presence of mind to take the Electoral Vote envelopes with them. These envelopes, sent from the several states and recording the votes of each member of the electoral college, are what actually gets counted at the Joint Session.

The Senate chamber fell to the mob a few minutes later. The rioters ransacked the desks of Senators and tore up and stole papers. There’s no doubt that the Electoral College envelopes would have been stolen or destroyed if they were left in the chamber.

Of course, the National Archive, which has copies of the certified Electoral College votes, could have produced new copies, but it might not have happened that same day and would have heaped more illegitimacy on the process: “Biden isn’t President. Congress didn’t even count the real votes!”

There could have been a major counter-protest

The January 6 protesters arrived in D.C. expecting a fight. They weren’t sure who they’d be fighting against, but a lot of them assumed that it would be Antifa, Black Lives Matter, rioters paid by George Soros and other bogeymen of MAGA-world. Many brought guns, even taking days to drive to the District instead of flying so airport security wouldn’t catch their armouries. They were ready.

So were the opposition, but not in the way we might have expected. By December 30, Nee Nee Taylor, a leader in Black Lives Matter D.C., was urging Trump’s opponents to stay away from the January 6 protests:

“We will be totally outnumbered,” Taylor explained, “Their president said, ‘stand back and stand by’ and this is the standby.”

Elected leaders echoed these calls, with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser pleading

“I am asking Washingtonians and those who live in the region to stay out of the downtown area on Tuesday and Wednesday and not to engage with demonstrators who come to our city seeking confrontation, and we will do what we must to ensure all who attend remain peaceful.”

The message was almost universal from local Democrat leaders and it worked. Counter-protesters stayed away.

What if they hadn’t? What if couple of thousand committed opponents of Trump had turned up on the streets of Washington to stand against the MAGA rallies?

They would have been outnumbered, of course. Perhaps very outnumbered, by heavily-armed Trump supporters who believed that they owned the streets and that the President had given them a mission. Police had planned to keep opposing protesters apart, but many seemed more worried about counter-protesters than the Trump side.

Things could easily have degenerated into pitched battles on the streets, with heavily armed and armoured Proud Boys, 3%er and Oath Keepers, plus thousands of other Jan 6 attendees, attacking groups of counter-protesters.

The right-wing demi-media and Twittersphere would doubtless have presented this as “Trump supporters are under attack!” Trump, faced with pressure from his friends and allies, might have decided to protect them using the D.C. National Guard or other federal forces, and imposed full martial law in the District, likely the night of January 5 before the Joint Session the next day.

The pipe bombs could have exploded

On the night of January 5, between 7:30 and 8:30pm, a masked, hooded person left a pipe bomb outside the Republican National Committee building and another by the Democratic National Committee.

The bombs were attached to egg timers, which suggests a short detonation period was planned. But, for whatever reason, they didn’t explode and were discovered the next day at 1pm, just as the rioters were closing in on the Capitol building.

The bomber has not been identified.

Imagine if the bombs had exploded, whether on the evening of January 5 or the day of January 6. Even with no loss of life, the additional chaos would have raised temperatures further, leading to “antifa” claims. And, of course, the bombs could have caused casualties too.

The shooting could have started

The January 6 protesters thought that Trump had called them to D.C. to do a job. Many brought rifles, handguns, huge quantities of ammunition and body armour. But they were cautious with carrying their weapons openly so as not to run afoul of D.C. gun laws and risk arrest, opting to carry knives, batons and bear spray.

Some, including the Oath Keepers militia, stashed their guns in their hotels, planning to retrieve them later if needed. Others left their weapons in their cars, parked around the city.

The Capitol was invaded too early, too quickly. They never had time to arm fully.

There were already protestors at the Capitol even while Trump’s ‘official’ rally took place at the Ellipse more than a mile away, pressing against the outer cordon and clashing with Capitol police. Over the course of his long speech, as Trump told that crowd that he would personally lead them in a march to Congress (he didn’t, of course), more begun to head to the Hill, overwhelming the early barricades. And then, at 1pm while he was still, speaking, Vice President Mike Pence published a letter.

Pence told the world:

"I do not believe that the founders of our country intended to invest the vice president with unilateral authority to decide which electoral voters should be counted during the Joint session of Congress, and no vice president in American history has ever asserted such authority. Instead, vice presidents presiding over joint sessions has uniformly follow the Electoral Count Act, conducting the proceedings in an orderly manner even where the count resulted in the defeat of their party or their own candidacy.”

This letter, alongside Trump’s increasingly-desperate speech urging Pence to betray his oath and sabotage the count, helped push things to a head and gave the rioters a new enemy. Faced with the sudden, shocking reality that Trump had lost, was losing and was going to lose once and for all, they got angrier and wilder and closed in on their target, bolstered by new arrivals converging on the Capitol.

The fighting was intense at many points: Police were attacked with flagpoles, batons and pepper spray in a three-hour battle for the Capitol tunnel, for example. At every point, police showed unusual restraint. They tried to hold the line but they didn’t fire at the crowds forcing their way into the Capitol building, even when officers were held down, kicked and beaten with poles. It may have been unspoken, but they knew: you don’t open fire at the President’s supporters. There are different rules.

It would only have taken one person, law enforcement or rioter, to start shooting and it would have turned into a bloodbath before the Capitol was even breached. Perhaps a police officer, fearing for a colleague’s life, would have decided to shoot at the rioters beating him. Perhaps a protester with a concealed pistol (and there were many) would have shot the police officer who was pepper spraying him.

With tens of thousands of hardcore Trump supporters ready to fight, it would have turned into a full-on armed conflict. Some of the rioters might have found time to get their rifles from their hotels or cars. The Oath Keepers, of course, had a Quick Reaction Force standing by in the hotel to bring them their guns if needed.

How does this scenario end? Possibly with the Capitol being breached, but this time with the rioters going in shooting. Possibly with the Insurrection Act and the National Guard taking control, under the ultimate command of Trump himself.

Trump could have called for his supporters to rise up

The January 6 insurrection would never have happened if Donald Trump hadn’t summoned his supporters to Washington on the same day as the Joint Session, promising them he would still win. He told them to march to Congress and force them to “do the right thing”. He created the conditions for the insurrection with months of undermining the election, the results and the process. But he could have made it so much worse.

Trump gleefully watched the Capitol invasion on TV even as Mike Pence ran for his life. He ignored desperate pleas from Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and even his own son, relayed via Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to condemn the riot and call for the mob to leave the Capitol. Eventually, he released a weird video praising the rioters but gently calling on them to go home.

But he must have been tempted to do the opposite. A call for them to occupy the Capitol all night would have forced the police to reoccupy the building room by room and carry them out one by one. A tweet at 3pm calling on his supporters nationwide to come out on the streets and fight to “Stop the Steal” might have led to mass uprisings across the country, emboldened the rioters in the Capitol and wider D.C. and maybe even precipitated ongoing domestic clashes.

Perhaps Trump’s own self-preservation instincts were too strong for him to indulge in something so risky, with so much potential legal exposure and personal danger. But I’m guessing it was a close thing. A few words on his iPhone and January 6 might have been the first day of the Second American Civil War.

Martial Law and the Insurrection Act

Several of the above scenarios end with the Insurrection Act.

Faced with real civil unrest in D.C. with the police overwhelmed, the National Guard could have been directly permitted to help the local police forces restore order. But the more dangerous option of the Insurrection Act loomed in the background.

For many months, since at least the George Floyd protests of summer 2020, some right-wing commentators had urged Trump to use the Insurrection Act to Federalise the National Guard or even send in regular troops to squash the protests and prevent riots — against the wishes of the states themselves. The loudest call was Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s New York Times Op-Ed “Send in the Troops”, but he was just one such voice among many.

But the Insurrection Act took on a more sinister symbolism too.

From the very beginning of QAnon, the first official “Q drop” post on 4chan mentioned the National Guard being activated to maintain order while US Marshalls arrested Hillary Clinton two days later (the failure of Q’s very specific and time-bound prediction in that first post didn’t seem to hurt Q’s credibility as much as you’d think). The idea that the military, especially the National Guard, would facilitate “the Plan” outside of normal civilian law was a key tenet of Trump-era QAnon. So a part of the most hardcore MAGA base —that part that either believed in QAnon or was open-minded and influenced by it — had been expecting something like the Insurrection Act for years.

So they were primed, after the 2020 election, for the idea that Trump could use the Insurrection Act to ‘legally’ carry out a coup. My last article covered how crossing the Rubicon became a byword in MAGA circles for a military coup, as did references to Washington and the Delaware, “watering the tree of liberty with blood”, and “the bullet box not the ballot box”.

Figures around Trump, like Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, pushed him to give the military a role in preventing Biden from taking office. Flynn shared a statement on Twitter that called for Trump to

immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a re-vote

Rumors that Trump had already signed the Insurrection Act and federalised the Guard kept spreading on MAGA channels.

The US defence establishment was aware of all this. Then acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller later told Congress that he was

“cognizant of the fears promulgated by many about the prior use of the military in the June 2020 response to protests near the White House and fears that the president would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner.”

A paper by Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix convincingly argues that Miller and the DoD leadership were scared to deploy the National Guard in case Trump gave the order for them to turn on the Congress they were there to protect.

In a lot of the scenarios above, though — hostages inside the Capitol, an armed bloodbath on the Capitol Grounds if the shooting started, pitched street battles on D.C. streets on the evening of Jan 5 between Trump’s supporters and opponents — using the Insurrection Act wouldn’t have seemed out of place, plausibly to “secure” the Joint Session and protect them from the MAGA rioters.

Once Trump had signed an order under the Act and taken direct command of the D.C. National Guard, though, it’s almost impossible to imagine he’d allow the Electoral Vote count continue unmolested. With Flynn, Byrne, Powell and the others in his ear, he’d have faced an impossible temptation to at least delay the Vote count for a day or two while the District was ‘secured’, and perhaps to federalise other states’ Guards to prevent civil disorder in the meantime. And then maybe, as the Flynn nexus had urged, to seize voting machines in battlefield states for a ‘military audit’…

It’s pretty likely that not all of the Guard would have complied with orders to clamp down on anti-Trump protests in these circumstances, and there would have been a mutiny, especially at the top. But there’s always someone who’ll give the order, someone who won’t resign.

I don’t think this would have resulted in a successful coup. If Congress was blocked from counting the Electoral Votes, Nancy Pelosi would have become acting President of the United States at noon on 20 January and Trump would turn into a pumpkin. The Supreme Court would have granted emergency injunctions affirming that it’s illegal for Trump to block Congress from meeting under Article 1 Section 6 of the Constitution. Half the Administration would have resigned. It would have failed.

But it would have provoked serious civil disorder across the United States, mutiny in the military, led to severe violence and weakened the ties holding US society together.

…

The storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 marked the end of Trump’s coup; after months of threats, incitement and abortive coup attempts, he slunk away quietly after the violence that day. Lasting damage was done to America and its institutions. The country was wounded. But maybe, despite everything, it had avoided the worst.

This is the second in a series of three articles I’m writing about the storming of the Capitol on January 6. The first article looked at the mindset of Trump's most hardened supporters in the weeks before the January 6 attack. The final piece next week will be on the lasting and ongoing impact of the Capitol riot.

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