U.S. Emergency Communications Are Vulnerable | Conspiracy Theorists Monetize 'Disease X' Misinformation | The Case Against Nationalism, and more

Nationalism is particularly dangerous in a diverse nation like the United States, where it is likely to exacerbate conflict. The ideology is virtually impossible to separate from harmful ethnic and racial discrimination of a kind conservatives would readily condemn in other contexts. Like socialism, with which it has important similarities, nationalism encourages harmful government control over the economy. Nationalism also poses a threat to democratic institutions. Finally, nationalist ideology is at odds with America’s foundational principles, which are based on universal natural rights, not ethnic particularism.
In crucial ways, nationalism is just socialism with different flags and more ethnic chauvinism. All Americans, but especially traditional conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians, should recognize nationalism’s dangers and recommit instead to the core principles of our founding.

US Conspiracy Theorists Monetize ‘Disease X’ Misinformation  (AFP / CNA)
Coined by the World Health Organization to denote a hypothetical future pandemic, “Disease X” is at the center of a blizzard of misinformation that American conspiracy theorists are amplifying - and profiting from.
The falsehoods, including that the unknown pathogen indicates an elitist plot to depopulate the earth, appeared to originate in the United States but spilled to Asia in multiple regional languages, AFP fact-checkers found.
The fast-spreading misinformation, which experts say illustrates the perils of reduced content moderation on social media sites, threatens to fuel vaccine hesitancy and jeopardize preparation for public health emergencies four years after the outbreak of COVID-19.
Stoking fears about Disease X, right-wing influencers in the United States are also cashing in on the falsehoods by hawking medical kits that contain what health experts call an unproven COVID-19 treatment.
“Misinformation mongers are trying to exploit this conspiracy theory to sell products,” Timothy Caulfield, from the University of Alberta in Canada, told AFP.
“This is often their primary mode of income. The conflict is profound. Without the evidence-free fearmongering about vaccines and government conspiracies, they’d have little or no income.”
The conspiracy theories particularly took off after the World Economic Forum - a magnet for misinformation - convened a “Preparing for Disease X” panel in January focused on a possible future pandemic.

U.S. Emergency Communications Are Vulnerable  (Richard Weitz, National Interest)
Last Thursday’s abrupt collapse of the AT&T cell network, along with recent news reports of Russian nuclear attack weapons in space, underscore threats to satellite, cellular, and cyber networks. Americans must take urgent measures to protect emergency communications as a national security imperative.
Millions of Americans throughout the country lost cellular signals on February 22. Though the blackout lasted only one day, the incident should be a wake-up call for policymakers to make the U.S. telecommunications architecture more resilient. Wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters have repeatedly toppled cell towers and disrupted internet service that our first responders and emergency management officials depend on to broadcast urgent messages.
Though cellular systems are primed for problems, Thursday’s outage was an accident, apparently caused by a flawed procedure to expand the network. Still, the chaos underscored the vulnerability of cell phone networks to malign actors as well as mishaps.
Russia, China, and other U.S. adversaries, including terrorists, aim to blind and paralyze Americans in a crisis. The Russian armed forces have repeatedly disrupted Ukrainian phone systems through cyber and electronic warfare attacks. The Pentagon has also taken down adversary communications in foreign military operations.
This month’s news highlighted the threat from Russia’s newly developed space nuclear attack weapon. These are reportedly designed to disable entire satellite constellations through nuclear-power energy surges and electromagnetic pulses.

The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending  (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic)
Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.
Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.
Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.

How to Tackle Truth Decay  (Deb Roy, The Atlantic)
When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up consuming more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “Science doesn’t know.”
Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise. People need to trust that the experts will tell the truth, and they need to trust the connections between themselves and the experts. A division of labor that was necessary because of our complex social and technological world created the vulnerability of a possible cleavage between expert elites and a distrustful populace.
Our belief in things we cannot ourselves verify relies on trust networks. If the connections to the experts are broken, our understanding of reality becomes untethered. Society then begins a slide into doubt and denialism, and “truth decay,” as a RAND initiative has called it, starts to occur. If we want to reverse that process, we need to rebuild the networks of trust.