How to Prevent Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories From Spreading Don't feed the trolls. by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook

The number of coronavirus infections and deaths continues to rise at an alarming rate, reminding us that this crisis is far from over. In response, the global scientific community has thrown itself at the problem and research is unfolding at an unprecedented rate.

The new virus was identified, along with its natural origins, and tests for it were rapidly developed. Labs across the world are racing to develop a vaccine, which is estimated to be still around 12 to 18 months away.

At the same time, the pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic of nonsense, disinformation, half-truths and conspiracy theories that have spread virally through social networks. This damages society in a variety of ways. For example, the myth that COVID-19 is less dangerous than the seasonal flu was deployed by US president Donald Trump as justification for delaying mitigation policies.

The recent downgrading of COVID-19 death projections, which reveal the success of social-distancing policies, has been falsely used to justify premature relaxing of social distancing measures. This is the logical equivalent of throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because it’s kept you dry until then.

The new conspiracy theory that blames COVID-19 on the 5G broadband system is one of the most bizarre pieces of misinformation. There are several strains of this theory, ranging from the claims that 5G alters people’s immune systems to the idea that 5G changes people’s DNA, making them more susceptible to infection. Then there’s the idea that secret messages about 5G and coronavirus were hidden in the design of the new £20 note in the UK. In reality, 5G relates to viruses and bank notes as much as the tooth fairy relates to zoology – not at all.

The 5G conspiracy theory originated in early March when an American physician, Thomas Cowan, proposed it in a YouTube video (which has since been taken down by YouTube according to their new policy). Some people have taken this conspiracy theory so seriously that it led to people setting 5G towers in the UK on fire and threatening broadband engineers.

The conspiracy theory has begun to penetrate mainstream society. Among other celebrities, UK TV personality Eamonn Holmes and US actor Woody Harrelson have given fuel to the idea.

Inoculating against conspiracy theories

As we document in our recent Conspiracy Theory Handbook, there is a great deal of scientific research into why people might be susceptible to conspiracy theories. When people suffer loss of control or feel threatened, it makes them more vulnerable to believing conspiracies. Unfortunately, this means that pandemics have always been breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, from antisemitic hysteria during the Black Death to today’s 5G craze.

An effective strategy for preventing conspiracy theories from spreading through social networks is, appropriately enough, inoculation. As we document in the Conspiracy Theory Handbook, if we inoculate the public by pre-emptively warning them of misleading misinformation, they develop resilience and are less likely to be negatively influenced. Inoculating messages can take several forms. As well as giving people the right facts, inoculation can also be logic-based and source-based.

Questioning the sources

The source-based approach focuses on analysing the people who push the conspiracy theory and the cultural infrastructure from which they emerged.

For example, the 5G theory began with Thomas Cowan, a physician whose medical licence is on a five-year probation. He is currently prohibited from providing cancer treatment to patients and supervising physician assistants and advanced practice nurses. So we can question his credentials.

His 5G video was from a talk he presented at a pseudo-scientific conference featuring a who’s who of science deniers. One of the headliners was Andrew Wakefield, a debarred former physician and seminal figure in the anti-vaccination movement who promotes highly damaging misinformation about vaccination based on data that he is known to have falsified.

Another attendee of this meeting was the president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, an organisation famous for bestowing awards onto fossil-fuel funded climate deniers and for giving a platform to a speaker who denied the link between HIV and AIDS, claiming that the link was invented by government scientists who wanted to cover up other health risks of “the lifestyle of homosexual men.”

For the public to be protected against the 5G conspiracy theory, it is important to understand its emergence from the same infrastructure that also supports AIDS denial, anti-vaccination conspiracies and climate denial.

Questioning the logic

Another way to neutralise conspiracy theories is through logic-based inoculation. This involves explaining the rhetorical techniques and tell-tale traits to be found in misinformation, so that people can flag it before it has a chance to mislead them. In the Conspiracy Theory Handbook, we document seven traits of conspiratorial thinking. Spotting these can help people identify a baseless theory.

One trait that is particularly salient in the 5G conspiracy theory is re-interpreting randomness. With this thought pattern, random events are re-interpreted as being causally connected and woven into a broader, interconnected pattern.

For example, the introduction of 5G in 2019 coincided with the origin of COVID-19 and hence is interpreted to be causally related. But by that logic, other factors that were introduced in 2019 – say, the global phenomenon of Baby Yoda – could also be interpreted as a possible cause of COVID-19. Correlation does not equal causation. The 5G conspiracy theory is also immune to evidence, despite having been debunked extensively. To illustrate, some of the countries worst affected by the pandemic (such as Iran) do not have any 5G technology.

Of course, 5G has nothing to do with a virus. In the US, T-Mobile’s low-band 5G data is transmitted using old UHF TV channels. UHF TV did not cause coronavirus and neither does 5G.

The crucial role of social media platforms

Social media platforms contribute to the problem of misinformation by providing the means for it to quickly and freely disseminate to the general public. Given that 330,000 lives were lost in relation to AIDS in South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, when denying the disease’s link to HIV was official state policy. Given that people in the UK are now vandalizing potentially life-saving communication infrastructure, social media companies should not aid and abet the life-threatening disinformation that is spewed by a nexus of science deniers and conspiracy theorists.

To their credit, these firms are making an effort to be part of the solution to the problem of misinformation. For example, YouTube has announced that it will take down any video that espouses the 5G conspiracy theory. This is a move in the right direction.

There is considerable room for improvement, however. A recent test by the non-profit Disinfo.eu laboratory found much conspiratorial content on various social media platforms, and we were able to find hundreds of YouTube videos promulgating the 5G nonsense with a few keystrokes.

Much remains to be done.

What the "the Myth of Sisyphus" Tells Us About the Coronavirus Does life have meaning? by Thaddeus Metz

Albert Camus was a 20th century French Algerian thinker who won the Nobel Prize for his literary works. These days it is his novel The Plague that has naturally been receiving attention. In this essay I instead consider what Camus’ philosophical classic, The Myth of Sisyphus, reveals about the status of our lives with COVID-19.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus addresses a cluster of philosophical questions about how to appraise our lives, including whether life is worth living, how life is absurd, and what could make life meaningful. Camus answers these questions by reflecting on the image of Sisyphus, a mythic figure from ancient Greece.

Sisyphus had treated some of the gods disrespectfully, and so Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, punished him by having him roll a heavy stone up a large hill for eternity. Every time Sisyphus got the rock to the top of the hill, it would roll back to the bottom, at which point Sisyphus would roll the rock back to the top, only to see it fall back down again, ad infinitum.

It is a classic image of an absurd and meaningless life. “Are our lives like that?” Camus and many philosophers after him have asked.

Well, many are now, if they weren’t before.

Life with coronavirus

I have sprayed disinfectant on my kitchen surfaces. My sink, refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher are apparently free of 99.9% of all known germs. After having put the disinfectant away, I use my kitchen as normal.

I later realise that the bottle of disinfectant itself was not disinfected. Plastic evidently retains coronavirus for up to three days, and I bought the bottle from the shop – and who knows who touched it there? – only yesterday.

I disinfect the entire kitchen again, now including the bottle of disinfectant.

I have told my children about the importance of social distancing, but allow the teenager to go and play catch with one friend at the park. After all, they need to be two metres away from each other to play.

Two other friends in the meantime text him, and then soon join him at the park. A thunderstorm unexpectedly comes, and, being considerate, he invites them all to his place nearby, while I’m out foraging for food. I arrive home to find four teenagers huddled together looking at a computer screen.

I again tell my children about the importance of social distancing.

While in the car at a stoplight, I have used wipes to clean off my radio knobs, gear shift, and steering wheel.

Then I realise that the wipe itself now has coronavirus on it, supposing the bug was in my car. And my hands have of course been holding the wipe.

I instinctively use another wipe on my hands again, but then see that this wipe, too, that I have been touching will now have coronavirus. Since the light has now turned green, I proceed to touch the steering wheel…

I have taken a bit of poetic licence with these vignettes, but I expect they ring true. Note that it is not merely at the individual level that one finds such patterns, but also at the social one:

It appears that after about six to ten weeks of lockdown, the coronavirus transmission rate plummets, to the point where the risk of infection becomes small. At that point governments naturally let people out of their homes, to resume normal life.

But it takes just a handful of pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic people from the outside to reintroduce coronavirus to a population that, after lockdown, lacks it. And we know how quickly and widely it spreads.

Once coronavirus has returned to our part of the world, our governments will again require us to enter lockdown for some months. Then we shall return to our fare of Friends reruns, stilted conversations on Zoom, and the dreaded question, “So, what’s for lunch?”. The expansion and contraction of social life could continue indefinitely.

Coronavirus and the meaning of life

One part of the problem with Sisyphus is that his life is repetitive. He just rolls a large stone.

Another part of his problem is that his life is pointless. He never achieves anything with his stone-rolling.

Yet another is that Sisyphus is compelled to roll the stone. Zeus has given him no other option.

And, then, Sisyphus is surely bored.

Unlike a large stone, coronavirus is very small, and yet our struggle against it is precisely a Sisyphean task: we have no choice but to push coronavirus away, doing so over and over again, having little hope of that making a real difference, and being far from enlivened by the process.

Coronavirus is a plague not merely on the happiness that comes with health and wealth, but also on the meaning in our lives, which is something different. An important question at this point, which I leave unanswered here, is how to deal with a loss of meaningfulness. I note only that the strategies will not be the same as improving lung function or diversifying portfolio assets.

What the Bible Tells Us About Dealing With the Coronavirus Pandemic Humans have a need for a deeper meaning and understanding. by Hanna Tervanotko

“Death has come up into our windows, it has entered our palaces, to cut off the children from the streets and the young men from the squares.” (Jeremiah 9:20)

Catastrophes have always touched people’s lives. With these words, the prophet Jeremiah addressed a disaster of his time, centuries before the common era.

Scientists are working to explain the causes and origins of the coronavirus with evidence, yet conspiracy theories still abound.

Also, some religious leaders have suggested that the virus is God’s message for people. Whether the conspiracy theory is attributed to political manoeuvring or divine intervention, these theories propose that science does not explain disasters sufficiently for many people.

Throughout history people have believed that disasters carry otherworldly messages. Often these messages propose that people have some responsibility for their present suffering. Such a belief may encourage one to understand the causes of catastrophes so that they can be avoided in the future.

It also suggests that disasters such as a pandemic can teach people something about how life should be lived. The Bible contains many stories of God-sent illnesses which typically communicate punishment for wrongdoings.

Understanding these messages required interpretation and they asked for specific ritual treatment. As a researcher of biblical studies, I study the techniques people used to consult God about the future. Such methods allowed people to prepare themselves for possible calamities held for them in the future.

Understanding the human need to find explanations for the unknown may help us to understand the many non-scientific explanations that people continue to give for the pandemic.

Epidemics in the Hebrew Bible

In many cultures, different gods are responsible for different areas of life. In the stories of the Hebrew Bible (what some refer to as the Old Testament), one God is usually accountable for all spheres of life. Hence, this God has a role both in bringing illness and also in curing from it.

One narrative where God sends plagues concerns the Passover (this year celebrated from sundown on April 8 to sundown on April 16. God sends 10 plagues before the Jews were liberated from their slavery in Egypt.

One is the plaque of boils on human and animal bodies (Exodus 9:9). Despite this disaster, Pharaoh does not let the Jews leave. According to the story, Pharaoh himself is not infected by the boils, so that he can witness God’s control: “I have let you live: to show you my power” (Exodus 9:16). In this story, boils are a sign of God’s power.

Ritual response to plagues

The Bible seldom mentions doctors, but various religious experts including prophets and priests provide responses to the illnesses. Prophets were considered instrumental in conveying godly messages to people

In a situation of crisis, they explained why God was upset. For instance, prophet Jeremiah warns King Zedekiah that all the inhabitants of Jerusalem will die by the sword, famine and pestilence due to the Israelites’ transgressions.

Whereas prophets delivered godly messages, and helped to uncover the reason of illness, priests communicated with God through rituals. If the cause of illness was God’s anger, only God could provide recovery from it. Therefore, one had to appease the anger.

Priests could do this by carrying out the right rituals.

For example, priests advise the Philistines to return the ark of covenant together with a guilt offering in 1 Samuel 6. Guilt offering was a sacrifice which the priests carried out especially in a situation of an unintentional offence on behalf of the transgressor.

The transgressor had to provide the priest an unblemished ram for sacrifice, monetary compensation for the victim for the loss and a payment for the priest. Biblical legislation determines the guilt offering would settle the offence in front of God.

Rituals offer comfort

In the Hebrew Bible it was often more important to address the cause of the disease through a ritual than finding a medical cure to it. One may not have control over their fate, but rituals offered some sense of security in the midst of catastrophes.

During COVID-19 many religious people have turned to their religious responses. Others have engaged with actions that that create connections and care. They do not directly address the pandemic, but nonetheless offer them emotional relief.

People have always searched for meaning in their misfortunes in difficult times. It can be comforting to believe that things happen for a reason and something can be learned in chaotic situations.

Moreover, different explanations allow people to create their own responses to cope with the unknown. Recognizing this human need to rationalize crisis helps us to understand various explanations that people continue to give for the pandemic.

America And The West's Way Of Life May Not Survive The Coronavirus. The pandemic scare will change the way the people of the West see the world. by Ali Demirdas

Here's What You Need To Know: The faith in democracy, liberalism, and institutionalism is likely going to decline in favor of a state-centric, and strongman infused system, just as was the case in the interwar era (1918–1939).

The current pandemic has revealed that despite overwhelming wealth, scientific advancement and relative security, the Western world has literally been brought to its knees by an unlikely foe: COVID-19. The world is witnessing in amazement the image of Western governments—ones that they believed to have had the strength to offer ultimate protection, safety, and prosperity to their people—being shattered.

The irony: billions upon billions of dollars of defense investment, from hypersonic missiles to supersonic stealth jet fighters, are being rendered royally obsolete against this enemy because people could not obtain gloves, masks, and early detection kits that cost only a few dollars. For the first time since WWII, the Europeans feel invaded, and for the first time in nearly two centuries, the United States is struggling to defeat an invading army on its soil. All these things considered, the contagion will likely have monumental social, economic, and political impact on Europe and America.

For most Europeans, the bitter fact dawned on them that the motto “United in Diversity,” which signifies the common desire to “work together for peace and prosperity,” is good as long as the bubble of safety, affluence, and wealth is intact. The pandemic revealed the cherished ideal of European unity can easily be replaced by “everyone for themselves.”

Italy, the European epicenter of the pandemic, found itself left for dead by fellow Europeans. Germany blocked the export of emergency supplies and Czechia, another EU member, seized more than 100,000 face masks sent by China to help Italy.

At a time when Europeans ran away from the “plague” stricken Italy, abandoning the country to its fate, Russian president Vladimir Putin didn’t skip a beat, and flew to Rome on March 22 with his two colossal An-22 cargo planes full of medical supplies, that bore stickers with a heart and the words “From Russia with Love.” To further embarrass those who believed that Germany couldn’t help Italy because it too was battling the disease, China, the hardest-hit country in the world, didn’t hesitate sending Italy 300 intensive care doctors and 30 tons of medical supplies. One of the poorest nations in the world, Cuba, sent doctors to Italy.Maurizio Massari, Italy’s permanent representative to the European Union complained, “We asked for supplies of medical equipment, and the European Commission forwarded the appeal to the member states. But it didn’t work.” For now, Italy’s spiking anger for the EU is masked by desperation to save its people. Having already felt abandoned by Brussel’s reluctance to address the refugee influx into their soil, once this is all over, the Italians will seriously reconsider the value of the EU for them, questioning the purpose of their membership. #Itexit is currently one of the most trending tags on social media.

Italy is not alone in its loneliness. Bulgaria’s Defense Minister Krasimir Donchev stated, “As you can see, we have not received a single mask from the European Union so far. We get help from China, from Turkey…” The president of Serbia, Aleksander Vučić, an aspirant EU state, said that, “European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper. I have sent a special letter to the only ones who can help, and that is China…”

The situation on the other side of the Atlantic is not any different. The United States, the world’s superpower with its defense budget larger than the next nine states combined ($618 billion), is severely crippled by, as President Donald Trump acknowledges, an invisible enemy. The notion of pride, freedom, invincibility, and prosperity that the American people are so used to has vanished abruptly as they are humbled by the fear of contagion, confined in their homes by the lockdown orders, and by the reality that they are about to or have already lost their jobs.

More importantly, the pandemic exposed not only the government’s incompetence in disaster management, but also the fragility of the American economy and the inefficiency of its already ailing healthcare. The system that is capable of spending $6.4 trillion dollars on “forever wars” abroad hasn’t been able to prevent American citizens from dying due to an insufficient number of ventilators, test kits, and other relevant medical supplies. Meanwhile, it is as if Wall Street has developed the habit of begging Washington for bailouts almost every decade. The perception that the gluttonous corporations, not the people of America, are the primary recipients of the bailout is aggravating Americans. With free-market principles in Washington being thrashed, the U.S. government will become the owner, albeit temporarily, of private corporations, which is reminiscent of the practice in Russia. The proposed $2 trillion dollars will add to an already morbid $1 trillion deficit, further straining the American economy in the long run. Currently, the U.S. National Debt runs at a whopping $23.6 trillion. Even more disturbing is the skyrocketing U.S. unemployment rates, which may end up topping 20 percent. The weekly increase in new employment claims has already surpassed the increase in any week during the Great Recession, which stretched from December 2007 through June 2009.

So what could one expect in the post-Coronavirus Western world?

The pandemic is likely going to accelerate the demise of the already scarred liberal democracies in the West. As if the refugee influx, ascendant right-wing politics, aging population, and economic stagnation were not enough to render the foundations of a united Europe project shaky, Brussel’s abysmal failure to tackle the pandemic will likely speed up a union-wide insurrection, propelling the Eurosceptic parties to the forefront. With the Brexit example still fresh in our mind, debates about “Itexit” and/or “Spexit” are going to be heightened in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The pandemic has further divulged the clumsiness and inefficiency of the EU bureaucracy, heralding the demise of supranationalism. States and strongmen are increasingly dominating the Western world, and we should get used to it. In Europe, the refugee issue has already produced such strongmen as Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland. The combination of the refugee crisis and the spell of Coronavirus on Europe may very well lead to the rise of Marine Le Pen of France, Matteo Salvini of Italy, and Santiago Abascal of Spain—all right-wing, anti-refugee, and Eurosceptic. Orbán is already using the pandemic to seize unlimited power, which many believe will undermine democracy and the rule of law in Hungary.

Let’s remember that the idea of a united Europe, where free trade, democracy, and human rights would reign supreme, was born in the aftermath of WWII out of the conviction that all these values would create codependence, preventing otherwise savage European nations from slaughtering each other.

In the United States, as in Europe, the pandemic will further accelerate the ripening of conditions for a strongman rule. Trump was elected in 2016 with his anti-immigration, right-leaning, and “America First” rhetoric. He has undermined international liberalism by taking aim at international organizations such as the United Nations and NATO, and pulled America out of Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accord, and NAFTA. He clearly expressed his displeasure with globalism. At home, Trump has displayed autocratic tendencies. The fear and shock the Americans experience during the pandemic is going to nourish the views for a strongman paving way for Trump’s re-election.

The pandemic scare will change the way the people of the West see the world. The faith in democracy, liberalism, and institutionalism is likely going to decline in favor of a state-centric, and strongman infused system, just as was the case in the interwar era (1918–1939). With the United States receding from world affairs, Europe is turning to Russia and China for guidance, which will further help the erosion of the European values. With Trump poised for re-election, the United States, like Europe, if not careful, could lean toward authoritarianism and away from democracy.

The Utter Futility of Biden’s China Rhetoric The Democratic candidate tries to out-hawk Trump, but trying to beat Republicans at their own game is pointless—even dangerous. by Peter Beinart Professor of journalism at the City University of New York

If he wants to attack Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19, Joe Biden has an embarrassment of options. The presumptive Democratic nominee could slam Trump for ignoring his own advisers’ warnings about the potential severity of the virus. Biden could skewer the president for his administration’s inability to develop a coronavirus test. He could blast the Trump administration for failing to adequately stockpile personal protective equipment. He could condemn the large quantities of misinformation that Trump has propagated about the disease.
For the moment, however, Biden has chosen a different angle: He’s attacking Trump for knuckling under to Beijing. Yesterday, the Biden campaign unveiled an ad—filled with menacing images of Chinese soldiers—claiming that “Trump rolled over for the Chinese.” It follows another spot, paid for by the pro-Biden super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, depicting the incumbent as a stooge for Beijing. “Everyone knew they lied about the virus—China,” a narrator declares, against the backdrop of a fluttering Chinese flag. “President Trump gave China his trust.” On Friday, the Biden adviser Antony Blinken told reporters that “the president praised China and President Xi more than 15 times.”

The Biden camp’s logic is easy to understand. Trump has made China the primary scapegoat for his failures. His supporters are running ads under the hashtag #BeijingBiden. So Biden and his strategists are meeting fire with fire. They’re answering the charge that the former vice president is soft on China by saying that Trump is.

This form of ideological jujitsu comes naturally to Democrats of Biden’s generation, who in the 1990s tried to turn the tables on Republicans who had been painting them as antibusiness, anti-military, and pro-criminal during the Nixon and Reagan eras. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to cut taxes. In 2000, Al Gore proposed to spend more on the military than George W. Bush. And in 1994, after successfully shepherding Clinton’s crime bill through the Senate, Biden crowed, “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells … I’d like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.”

In the 1990s, beating the GOP at its own game was at times politically shrewd. Clinton’s ghoulish enthusiasm for the death penalty—which in 1992 led him to leave the campaign trail to oversee the execution of the mentally disabled murderer Ricky Ray Rector—probably helped inoculate him from the soft-on-crime attacks that had helped sink Michael Dukakis in 1988. Still, Biden’s decision to try to out-hawk Trump on China has three major problems. First, it promotes bad foreign policy. Second, it could stoke anti-Chinese racism. Third, it doesn’t even make long-term sense politically. Republicans, who promoted economic integration with China in the past, are now committing themselves to a cold war with China. If Democrats think that’s a political environment in which they’ll thrive, they’re making a big mistake.

First, the policy. The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on China’s leaders. The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.

This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call, no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.

The second problem with Biden’s attempt at ideological jujitsu is that, as with the crime bill, vulnerable people may get hurt. Democratic presidential candidates have bashed China before. But this isn’t an ordinary moment. The coronavirus—and Trump’s racist rhetoric about it—have sparked a horrifying rise in attacks on Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans. To his credit, Biden has condemned Trump’s “xenophobia and fear-mongering.” Without meaning to, however, his new ads may exacerbate it.

A presidential candidate can, of course, attack the Chinese government without attacking Chinese Americans. But doing so requires some rhetorical finesse—something the Biden ad lacks. The ad doesn’t say that Trump “rolled over” for “Xi Jinping” or the “Chinese government” or even “China.” It says he rolled over for “the Chinese.” As a result, Kaiser Kuo, editor at large of the website SupChina, told me, the ad may contribute to a political “race to the bottom,” in which “Asian Americans will suffer even more terribly from racism.”

Were the Biden camp’s anti-China ads a surefire winner with voters, Machiavellians might justify them as a necessary evil. But for Democrats, posturing as more anti-China than the GOP is a poor long-term bet.

For Republicans—such as Trump, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley—stoking antagonism toward China makes ideological sense. The GOP is the party of military spending, national sovereignty, and white anxiety. For decades, Republicans have been looking for a new Ronald Reagan to lead them to victory over a new evil empire. They’ve tried Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. But China is the most credible candidate yet: a nonwhite, non-Christian, nominally Communist power that really can challenge America’s dominance in the world.

Democrats are by nature the party that advocates spending on health care and education rather than on military confrontation. Democrats are the people who now say, in some polls, that climate change is their second-highest priority. You can’t view the climate threat as existential and simultaneously embrace a cold war that keeps the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide from cooperating. Hawks won’t find the Democrats’ anti-China posturing credible. Even if a few Never Trumpers abandon the GOP in 2020, they’ll eventually come home to Cotton’s or Rubio’s or Nikki Haley’s more respectable militarism. And in trying to out-jingo the GOP, Democrats will alienate their Millennial activist base.

By 2005, after two decades of Democrats like Biden and Clinton seeking to beat the GOP at its own game, the historian Rick Perlstein wrote a short book entitled The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo. Perlstein argued that for a political party, as for a corporation (“Superjumbo” is a reference to Boeing’s competition with Airbus), short-term gyrations in response to the vagaries of the market (the “stock ticker”) can have devastating long-term effects if they undermine its core identity. Clinton—who passed free-trade deals, deregulated the financial markets, cut welfare benefits, signed legislation against gay marriage, and helped fill America’s jails—won two presidential elections. But toward the end of his tenure, Democrats controlled fewer Senate seats and fewer state legislatures than they had in 50 years, and fewer governorships than they had in 30 years. Clinton had won; the Democratic Party had lost.

By attacking Trump for being insufficiently nationalist rather than being insufficiently internationalist, Biden is hastening a geopolitical confrontation that threatens progressive goals. And he’s sowing doubts about what the Democratic Party actually believes. He’s choosing short-term advantage over long-term principle.

This is what supporters of Bernie Sanders were worried about, and Biden is proving them right.