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President Donald Trump on Thursday sat down with two reporters from The New York Times and its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, for one of his semi-regular Oval Office interviews with the newspaper. As is tradition, the Times published a transcript of their discussion. This time, however, they made the curious and revealing decision to publish it in two parts.

The first one is the usual fare. Trump undermines Republican negotiators by asserting they won’t get anywhere with congressional Democrats. He implicitly threatens to declare a national emergency to secure funding for his border wall. He rails against the Russia investigation, then claims Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assured his lawyers he’s not a target of it. And he opines on the qualities of his potential Democratic challenges in 2020.

The second transcript is unique—a meta-interview on Trump’s hostile relationship with American journalism. The president, who recently gloated over media layoffs, pleads ignorance about his attacks’ corrosive impact on American journalism, and he claims to support a free press. He just wishes he got the credit he believes he deserves for his perceived accomplishments. “I came from Jamaica, Queens, Jamaica Estates and I became president of the United States,” he tells the reporters. “I’m sort of entitled to a great story from my—just one—from my newspaper.”

This surreal conversation is a useful window into why Trump’s presidency is so unpredictable and self-destructive—and shows how the press continues to hold out an unreasonable hope that he can be reasoned with, let alone persuaded to change his mind. Throughout the back-and-forth, Trump alternates between an unusually conciliatory tone and his familiar self-aggrandizement. Sulzberger, who asks most of the questions in this transcript, adopts a deferential but persistent stance in defense of a free press. Trump’s responses are flat and atonal unless he’s criticizing an adversary or touting himself. It reads like some kind of ancient Greek tragedy where a group of local nobles tries to persuade a mad king against further destruction; both sides know nothing will change, yet both sides still pretend otherwise.

Sulzberger tells Trump that foreign governments have used his rhetoric about “fake news” to justify crackdowns on independent media outlets. “And so it’s not, you know, about viral, you know, viral stuff on Facebook,” he tells the president. “It’s about countries using that term to actually ban independent scrutiny of their actions.” There’s a brief glimmer of recognition from the president. “I don’t like that,” Trump replies. “I mean, I don’t like that.” But the moment is short-lived. “I don’t like [that], though I do think it’s very bad for a country when the news is not accurately portrayed,” he says. “I really do. And I do believe I’m a victim of that, honestly.”

When Trump then tries to pivot to his accomplishments with China, Sulzberger steers the discussion back toward the broader fallout of Trump’s attacks, even for journalists that don’t cover him at all. “Would you say more so now than over the last five years?” Trump asks. Yes, Sulzberger replies. “Right now?” the president asks. “I mean, more so now than even a year ago?” Yes, the Times’ publisher confirms. “I’m not happy to hear that,” Trump declares. He soon reverts to his grievances against “inaccurate reporting.”

Trump later defends himself by insisting he’s not alone in his critique of the Times. “I know what you’re all saying,” he explains, “but everybody thinks The New York Times treats me terribly. Washington Post also.” When the meeting wraps up, Trump tries to end on an upbeat and unbelievable note. “I mean, you know, anyway I agree with you 100 percent, and I’m honored to have spent the time with you, and I’d like you to call me, and I’m going to work on that so hard you have no idea,” he told the Times’ team. “Cause I think you’re right.”

It’d be nice to think that the president meant that. But past experience suggests otherwise. Delegitimizing media outlets is too valuable a tactic for him to give up so easily. In a tweet last May, Trump effectively admitted that he uses “fake news” as a general term to describe negative coverage of his administration. It works, too: A poll earlier that spring found that 89 percent of Republicans think major news outlets spread fake news. Trump’s slim road to reelection depends on holding together his base, which means he needs to inoculate as many of them as possible from the whirlwind of bad news that surrounds him.

Even if the president gained no strategic advantage from his attacks on the press, there’s no reason to believe he’d ever relent. This has nothing to do with his prodigious talent for lying and fabulism. It’s that he is often unable to stick to any particular stance, especially when pressed on it in person. Even his own party struggles with his mercurial nature. Last January, they scrambled to remind Trump that he opposed a clean DACA vote after California Senator Dianne Feinstein pressed him to support it on national television. Pressure from conservative commentators over border wall funding last December led Trump to renege on congressional Republicans and force a self-destructive government shutdown.

This is who Trump is, and there’s no changing him at this point. It’s clear that he lacks either the will or the desire to constrain many of his worst impulses, especially where the press is concerned. The evidence so far suggests that, if anything, he actively enjoys indulging in them. The Rosetta stone for his presidency isn’t The Art of the Deal or special counsel Robert Mueller’s eventual report. It’s a post on Twitter that he published in the late morning hours of November 19, 2012, three years before he ran for president: “It makes me feel so good to hit ‘sleazebags’ back—much better than seeing a psychiatrist (which I never have!)”

The iconic American beer with the cherry-red label is going green. Since 2017, Budweiser has ditched its gas-powered delivery trucks in favor of Teslas. It has begun converting all of its U.S. brewing operations to 100 percent renewable electricity, as its bottles and cans now proudly advertise. And Budweiser’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, has also announced that all of its 400 beer brands will be renewable-powered by 2025.

Now, the largest beer brewer in the world is taking its green messaging to the Super Bowl. Of the eight commercials Anheuser-Busch plans to air on Sunday, three are environmentally themed. The most explicit is its Budweiser commercial, in which Clydesdale horses run alongside twisting wind turbines to the tune of Bob Dylan’s protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Anheuser-Busch’s planned commercial for Stella Artois, “Change Up the Usual,” also has a green tinge. It stars Jeff Bridges, reprising his role as The Dude in The Big Lebowski, and Sarah Jessica Parker, reprising her role from Sex and the City, as they eschew their favored drinks—White Russian and Cosmopolitan, respectively—in favor of the Belgian pilsner. The ad directs viewers to a website that says Bridges and Parker “are changing up their usual drinks of choice for a Stella Artois to help provide water access to people in need.” As an Anheuser-Busch marketing executive told Adweek, “The whole campaign is a rallying cry to the American public to join us in the cause of providing clean drinking water to the people who need it.”

Lastly, the company’s ad for Michelob Ultra Pure Gold features a montage of lush green nature shots. It’s a place “so pure you can feel it,” the commercial says—to be enjoyed with beer “so pure you can taste it.” The tagline declares that this is “beer in its organic form.”

Anheuser-Busch apparently doesn’t consider any of these ads to be political. In fact, a company spokesperson told Business Insider that they’re part of a concerted effort by the company to avoid politics after its pro-immigration Super Bowl ad in 2017. This year, the spokesperson said, “We will only talk about or engage in topics that are authentic to our brands or company.”

But this is a political issue, whether Anheuser-Busch admits or not. And that makes it all the more notable given the company’s support for two powerful political organizations that work to block meaningful action on climate change.

Environmental issues are indeed authentic topics for Anheuser-Busch. The largest beer brewer in the world needs an abundant supply of clean water, and stable growing conditions for barley and hops. All three are severely threatened by climate change. Increased extreme temperatures and drought, for example, are expected to lead to a decrease in yields of barley anywhere from 3 to 17 percent. This could cause global beer prices to rise, and consumption to decline by up to 16 percent worldwide. Climate change also disrupts the water cycle, which is expected to have a huge impact on drinking water supplies.

These projections aren’t good for Anheuser-Busch’s business, so the company has a financial interest in taking on this worthy cause. It’s also wise marketing, as research has shown that consumers are willing to pay around $1.30 more per six-pack of beer that they consider sustainably-produced. But while the company seeks to convince consumers that it’s environmentally responsible, behind the scenes it has associated with two groups that are enemies of the climate movement: The American Legislative Exchange Council, otherwise known as ALEC, and the Chamber of Commerce.

ALEC is a shadowy, influential conservative group that develops model legislation promoting “principles of limited government, free markets, and federalism.” Its climate denialism and rejection of climate regulation has caused even major oil companies, like Exxon Mobil, to renounce membership. The anti-environment, anti-climate positions of the Chamber of Commerce has also caused a number of businesses to leave the organization.

Both organizations keep their membership lists private, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest Anheuser-Busch’s associations. The company is listed as an active member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and has been recognized as a distinguished member by several local chapters. Anheuser-Busch representatives were also on the list of attendees at ALEC’s 2017 annual member meeting, and more than 70 groups asked the company to drop its ALEC membership last year after a white supremacist spoke at the annual conference. Anheuser-Busch did not respond to that demand, nor did it respond to my request to confirm its memberships in these groups.

Anheuser-Busch frames its commitment to renewable energy and clean water as being for the good of the planet, not the company’s bottom line. “Climate change is the most pressing issue confronting our planet,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Carlos Brito said in 2017. “We at AB InBev are committed to doing our part.” But if that’s true, then the planet could use fewer virtue-signaling Super Bowl ads and more honesty about the political causes that Budweiser drinkers are unwittingly supporting.

Ever since Howard Schultz announced on Sunday that he was considering an independent bid for president, a kind of mass hysteria has gripped the left broadly. The overwhelming reaction was one of fear: that the former Starbucks CEO would split the Democratic vote, guaranteeing a second term for President Trump. Others responded with dismissal, arguing that there is “zero appetite” among voters for a Schultz presidency. Rather than engage with Schultz—who, it is true, has offered little of substance other than attempting to incite undue panic about the national debt—Democrats have thrown an entitled tantrum.

This behavior bears an unflattering resemblance to the lane-clearing that party officials employed ahead of the 2016 election, coronating Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee well before the Iowa caucuses. And we all know how that turned out. If the Democrats want to ensure that Schultz doesn’t do irreparable damage to their 2020 chances, they had better take him seriously—even if it’s more than his feeble agenda deserves.

For all of the media attention that Schultz has received on his exploratory publicity tour, though, this is not yet the crisis that many imagine. Schultz may be a temporary distraction from the nascent primary season, but he’s also an easy target: an out-of-touch billionaire with unpopular ideas straight out of the Democratic Party of the 1990s. He presents a stark opportunity for Democrats to show where they stand—by rejecting Clintonism once and for all.

Schultz’s path to the White House is improbable, but Democrats have reason to worry. He has been singularly focused on ridiculing their policy proposals, particularly universal health care and tax hikes on the wealthy, and argues that they have become just as extreme as Trump’s Republican Party. While Schultz has yet to develop a robust platform, his statements betray a clear political strategy: He knows that Trump’s Republican support is largely immovable, so his only chance of success is to steal substantial votes from the Democrats. “To win a majority of electoral college votes, which Schultz says would be his goal,” The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer reported on Thursday, “he would have to ultimately replace the Democratic nominee as the favored choice of voters who do not want Trump to win a second term. In practice, this has led Schultz to focus far more of his initial fire on Democrats than Trump.”

Schultz has other advantages. Much of the mainstream media, and especially the Beltway press, is uncomfortable with political polarization—and very comfortable with moderates and rich people. Thus, Schultz “got a super-cushy red carpet for his possible 2020 presidential run ... despite his lack of political experience,” argued The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan. “Why do journalists and news organizations insist on doing this? I think the answer is pretty clear. It’s because they want to appear fair without taking any chances.” At Daily Kos, Eric Boehlert wrote that “Schultz is clearly benefiting from our Davos-style political culture, where billionaires are automatically held up as symbols of what is right and just. And if a billionaire raises his hand and says he wants become president without facing any primary-season opponents, the media parts like the Red Sea and prepares a seat for him in front of an eager television host.”

So Schultz does pose an electoral threat for Democrats, even if his bid ultimately fails. Over the past two years, Democrats from all ideological persuasions have begun to unite around a leftist agenda on universal health care, gun control, economic redistribution, and climate change. While there are serious disagreements about how these policies would be enacted, the party has largely turned its back on the triangulation and incrementalism of the Clinton years and promoted bold progressivism as an antidote to Trumpism. A Schultz candidacy would erase that neat binary in a general election.

Schultz has center-right instincts. He believes that the two parties have made it difficult for Americans to talk about—and therefore fix—divisive social issues like racism, and sees private industry as both an engine of change and a safety net for workers. He is, as HuffPost’s Zach Carter wrote earlier this week, exactly the kind of elite figure that would have been feted by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich alike during the heady days of the 1990s: “Since the government was too clunky and inefficient to spend money wisely, according to this orthodoxy, it was best to get deficits down through spending cuts, rather than tax increases, although a slight hike for the richest households could be stomached for the sake of appearances.”

Schultz won’t compete in the Democratic primary because, he says, he doesn’t believe in universal health care or free college, but it’s also because he knows can’t win the party’s nomination. The question is whether his positions—few though they may be at this stage—are broadly popular. The evidence is that they’re not. Polling shows majority support for universal health care and taxing the rich, while almost no one thinks the national debt, Schultz’s hobbyhorse, is the most important problem in America. And that’s about all we know about Schultz’s platform. Despite having formed a political team months ago, he has no policy proposals whatsoever—including about how to pay down the national debt.

Rather than treating him as a potential spoiler, Democrats should portray Schultz as emblematic of everything wrong with Trump’s America. His opposition to taxing the wealth, support for cutting entitlements, and belief that plutocrats can solve the country’s pressing problems make him the perfect villain. This is smart politics, as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz argued on Thursday, “There’s little to no evidence that railing against ‘the billionaire class’ hurts Democrats electorally by making them sound too ‘far left.’... Meanwhile, there is significant evidence that the deployment of populist, ‘us versus them’ rhetoric increases the salience of class resentments in U.S. elections—and thus, increases the Democratic Party’s share of the vote.”

Democrats can use Schultz’s political flirtation as a dry-run for the policy arguments they will make over the next two years. At the same time, they can fully bury the specter of the Clintons and move on as a new kind of party. If they don’t, they’ll leave themselves vulnerable to a regression; now is the time to inoculate the party against a resurgence of outdated liberalism, one that’s friendly to corporations and squeamish on social issues. Because as Democrats advance more ambitious policies, like a 70 percent tax on the wealthy, more Schultzes will emerge with political aspirations, accusing the party of irresponsible spending, “un-American” taxes, and class warfare. Some of these plutocrats will be more politically experienced than Schultz. Some may even be Democrats.

Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom. 

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.” 

I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

What’s a brigade attack, you may ask? It’s a rather dramatic name for coordinated harassment, usually migrating from one social media site to another. Often hatched in the internet’s right-wing cesspools, these campaigns unleash a mass of harassment on unsuspecting targets. 4chan’s /pol/ board—a gathering-place for people who want to say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence—has an oversize role in organizing brigade attacks, in part due to the fact that all its users are anonymous. 

While it’s difficult to trace the origins of brigading—like most of internet history, its beginnings are ephemeral—the term, and its tactics, came to new prominence during the loosely organized and militantly misogynist harassment campaign known now as GamerGate, which unfolded over the course of 2014 and 2015. 

“I think brigading has always been around,” said Caroline Sinders, a design and research fellow with the digital program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who received enormous volumes of harassment during GamerGate. “I think of it like ‘campaigning’—it’s coordinated, it’s planned, it’s designed. Brigading is like targeting a victim and planning a course of attack—from overwhelming their mentions, flooding a hashtag, to SEO bombing.” 

After Sinders wrote about GamerGate harassment online, a SWAT team was called to her mother’s house—a malevolent kind of “prank” that has resulted in at least one death.

Shireen Mitchell, founder of the project Stop Online Violence Against Women, had a similar experience during GamerGate. A campaign originating on Reddit targeted a South by Southwest panel on online harassment at which Mitchell was scheduled to speak. It received thousands of “down-votes” when audiences were encouraged to vote on proposed panels at the festival. Mitchell and others involved with the panel were bombarded with abuse and threats, accused of being biased against GamerGate. 

“I was overwhelmed,” Mitchell told me. “They collected our information, created lists of our names, then made up accounts to pretend to be in a rational debate while attacking us on the back end.” 

In the end, South By Southwest convened a separate Online Harassment Summit, at which security was so tight due to threats of violence that, Mitchell told me, she “had a security detail the whole time.”  

The attacks on Mitchell and other panelists were vicious, while wrapped in a thin guise of concern about “ethics in games journalism.” This was the rationale for the entire GamerGate harassment campaign, an ugly welter of death threats, stalking, SWATting, and precision targeting of women, particularly women of color, for abuse. But that rationale was taken seriously by both media outlets, which wrote up the controversy as if it were a genuine conflict between two sides of equal legitimacy, and by advertisers, which pulled support for media organizations targeted by “Operation Disrespectful Nod”—a GamerGate brigading campaign. 

GamerGate was essentially a public test of weapons online trolls would use to inflict hell on anyone who they perceived as enemies, with a central focus on journalists. Its tactics have only grown in sophistication in the intervening years. In particular, it was notable for the way it used a consistent, specious narrative—ethics in games journalism—to cover for its ugliest actions.

“The basis was that only white male gamers are actually good at games. So everyone else needs to go through some ‘ethics’ screening,” Mitchell explained. “That women sleep around and minorities are only given jobs because of their skin not because they are qualified. So that became the ruse. The narratives are used as cover.”

GamerGate used sympathetic journalists to add a patina of legitimacy to its cover narrative—a tactic that has been repeated with the ongoing harassment campaign called “Learn to Code.”

When I smelled the putrid odor of a brigade attack, I decided to do a little research into the origins of this sudden, and plainly coordinated, bombardment of “learn to code” tweets. (There were also death threats and a flood of anti-Semitic Instagram comments.) It was a fairly simple operation: I clicked over to 4chan’s /pol/ board and searched for the phrase.

In a thread entitled “HAPPENING - Huffpo / Buzzfeed / other MSM garbage (((journalists))) FIRED,” which discussed the extant and impending layoffs, there were dozens of responses laying out the “learn to code” plan.

“Learn to code is what should be spammed over and over. Fuck these elitist cunts,” wrote one user.

“Reminder to tell all the fired fucks to learn to code,” wrote another. 

“I’m not ready to declare victory until these maggots are killing themselves with a live stream,” wrote a third.

An odd little narrative sprung up around this malevolence, postulating that journalists had condescendingly told coal miners who had lost their jobs to “learn to code.” The scant evidence for this quickly debunked narrative was a collage of several articles covering programs to retrain jobless former coal miners in the rudiments of coding, and bipartisan job-training efforts. 

But as with “ethics in games journalism,” the narrative was just a means to deflect attention from the ultimate goal of adding distress to a terrible week for journalists. 

Multiple right-wing media figures consciously took the bait. After the Wrap’s Jon Levine misleadingly tweeted that simply typing “learn to code” might get Twitter users suspended, conservative figureheads leaped in, leveraging conservative paranoia about social-media censorship. “Our nation’s bravest firefighters must be protected from microaggressions like ‘learn to code’ jokes on Twitter. Pathetic,” wrote Daily Wire pundit Ben Shapiro. Donald Trump, Jr. weighed in: “Could someone explain to me why if I tell my kids to ‘learn to code’ it’s likely sound parenting, but if I told a journalist the same it’s grounds for a @twitter suspension?”

Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s most openly white-supremacist host and a frequent amplifier of far-right meme warfare, ran a segment about the trolling campaign for his roughly three million viewers. 

“Someone on Twitter came up with a pretty brilliant piece of advice for all those laid-off journalists trying to figure out what to do with their lives: Learn to code. Perfect. Suddenly ‘learn to code’ was everywhere on Twitter,” Carlson said. “But journalists didn’t see the humor in this at all. A former New Yorker employee called Talia Lavin called the phrase, quote, ‘far right hate’ ... so they complained to the censorship authorities at Twitter.”

For me, the open hostility of “learn to code” was, from the first moment, compounded by escalating misogyny and anti-Semitism. One Twitter user posing as a Jew named “Moshey Goldberg” sent me a photo of a pizza with a crude caricature of a Jew on it. It said “Oven-Ready.” Others utilized a photoshopped meme of Tucker Carlson in a skull bandana of the type favored by certain fascist groups. “Day of the Rope,” it read, a reference to a scene in The Turner Diaries, a novel that remains the ur-text of the American far right and was an inspiration for Timothy McVeigh, where political enemies are hanged en masse.

The experience of the “learn to code” campaign was being bombarded with harassment that others stridently claimed wasn’t harassment; being told death threats were a joke; having my name broadcast mockingly on Fox News—all for the temerity of tweeting about losing a column. It was an experience of being mugged by gaslight.

I’ve chosen to write and speak about it not to celebrate my own victimhood, or to claim that a harassment campaign against journalists is the most significant issue being faced by any American. I write about it because it shares such overt DNA with harassment campaigns born in GamerGate and perfected since—and because it is long past time that far-right trolls stopped being granted any presumption of innocence and plausible deniability. I chose to expose this campaign, knowing it would bring me nothing but grief, because I didn’t want to see such a campaign succeed without opposition. And I wrote about it because campaigns against journalists aren’t going to go away; the moment trolls like these see an opening, whether the provocation is real or imagined, they will harass journalists again.

After all, the goal was clear from the start: “Rub it in their fucking faces. Yell at them, call them names, accuse them of being pedos. DM them pics of nooses or gay porno. Zero fucking mercy. Make them regret ever standing against us,” one 4chan user wrote in the thread that launched it all. “You know what to do, lads.”

Aleksandar Vucic is a busy president. The Serbian leader claims to work at least 15 hours a day, from early in the morning until at least 10:30 in the evening—“as long as I can endure.” And from his Russian lessons at 6:30 am—language skills he exhibited during the sumptuous January reception for Russian President Vladimir Putin in Belgrade—to almost daily press conferences, Vucic is in the press all day, every day.

The part many outside observers seem to miss, as evidenced by Vucic’s invitation to a panel on media freedoms at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, is that ever since Vucic’s ascent to power in 2012, the freedom of that press has been under attack.

Shock spread quickly amongst journalists and political observers after the announcement that Vucic would be part of the Davos panel titled “Media Freedoms in Crisis,” alongside Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron and hosted by Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler. “Until the very last moment, I thought it wouldn’t happen,” journalist and Serbian media expert Tamara Skrozza told me. “I thought someone, somewhere would understand that this can’t happen.”

During the panel, Vucic shared his concern about press freedom in Serbia, but claimed he was working to solve such problems. “He definitely should not have been allowed to advertise his alleged successes, spread falsehoods and purport that he is something other than what we know him to be. It’s scandalous,” said Skrozza. Two of the leading journalist associations in the country condemned his participation in the panel, stating that Vucic had no “moral right to share recommendations on the media in the country.”

The Davos event only reinforced the feeling among Serbian journalists that their struggle to highlight abuses in the country are being ignored internationally. News about journalists being targeted by politicians, anywhere in the world, have a distressingly familiar ring these days. With the Trump White House recalibrating American expectations for openness, and usual suspects like Putin’s Russia and Saudi Arabia dropping in global press freedom rankings faster than most watchdogs can churn them out, smaller and consistently unstable countries like Serbia barely manage to register. But Serbian journalists aren’t alone in seeing a problem: Even with little acknowledgment from the international community, the country dropped 10 spots in Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking last year.

The increased prominence of media intimidation globally, as well as the relative disinterest in the Balkans, compared to the clear and countable abuses such as the jailing of journalists by Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have made it easier for leaders like Vucic to quietly quash criticism without attracting too much attention. Unlike Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Russia, however, Serbia is currently in the process of joining the European Union. Membership includes an accession process of aligning a country with the EU’s political and human rights principles, press freedoms included. But that aspect of Vucic’s governance has often been ignored, in return for his complaisance in another issue: the independence of Serbia’s former southern province, Kosovo, a hot-button issue since the disintegration of Yugoslavia and NATO bombing in 1999.

Vucic’s first role in government was suppressing dissent as Minister of Information during the Kosovo War—a protege of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party’s leader, Vojislav Seselj, who was later convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Since then, Vucic has denounced his earlier actions. He and future president Tomislav Nikolic formed the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), a conservative but pro-European party, in 2008, and won the next elections, representing a compromise for those who wanted the economic and political benefits of EU accession but also valued Vucic’s and Nikolic’s nationalist credentials. Vucic himself ascended to the cabinet in 2012, then to the post of prime minister in 2014, winning the presidency in the April 2017.

But the media has long been a key component of Vucic’s consolidation of power, his critics say. “From the very beginning, Vucic publicly complained about the lack of support from the elites in the country, including political analysts and journalists from respectable papers,” said Jovana Gligorijevic, a journalist and editor at the influential weekly Vreme. “He still doesn’t have that support. So he decided to construct it artificially by forming his own parallel structures of media outlets and analysts.”

As SNS grew, so did Vucic’s incremental accumulation of loyal outlets. Compliant editors and journalists quickly replaced critical voices; ad revenue to critical outlets from companies that either have partial government ownership or are close to the government was cut off; and outlets deemed unfavorable were given less and less access. The public broadcaster, the Radio Television of Serbia, quickly fell into line, but so did former bastions of critical thought like the now defunct B92, a critical radio and later TV channel that used to be synonymous with brave journalism during the Yugoslav wars in the 90s.

Positive coverage kept Vucic from appearing weak or subservient to the EU—a liability in Serbian politics. Anytime a significant compromise was made in the ongoing political dialogue with Kosovo, or a particularly painful reform needed to be instituted as part of Serbia’s EU accession process, tabloids featured stories about how Vucic had stood up to the representatives of Kosovo’s Albanian majority, trying to contort it into a victory. Those pointing out deficiencies in this logic—critical outlets like the daily Danas, weeklies Vreme and NIN, as well TV channels like N1—would either be shouted down by Vucic personally during press conferences, or be torn apart for days by tabloids and on social media.

In the past few months, however, press intimidation and government-friendly media consolidation has escalated. On November 23, leftist politician Borko Stefanovic was viciously attacked by men dressed in black. The event launched weeks of protests in Belgrade that quickly outgrew their initial impetus, tens of thousands of disgruntled citizens joining in a general expression of discontent. As the protests grew, so did the pressure on the media.

Ivan Ivanovic, one of Serbia’s most well-known TV personalities and until recently the host of a popular weekly talk show on the Prva channel, was one of the first to be targeted. After tweeting his criticism of a Vucic-loyal outlet for questionable coverage both dismissing and demonizing the protesters, Ivanovic found himself the center of attention.

At a press conference days later, Vucic denounced Ivanovic’s tweet, falsely claiming it had called for violence against the journalist in question. “I was shocked,” Ivanovic told me. The following day, tabloids published numerous stories saying Ivanovic was a foreign agent and traitor.

Simultaneously, Ivanovic’s outlet was being taken over. The Prva television network, with national reach, had made Ivanovic one of the few individuals in Serbia with continuous access to homes across the country. Channels like N1, considered to be one of the most independent, are only available on cable and reach significantly fewer viewers. Around the time of the first protest, news broke that both Prva and 02, another national broadcaster, were being bought by Kopernikus, a company with close ties to SNS and a staunch supporter of their policies. Ivanovic chose not to continue as the host of “Tonight with Ivan Ivanovic.” His last, two-hour new-year-themed program scheduled to air on December 31st was cancelled overnight.

Milan Jovanovic, a small-town investigative journalist from Grocka, suffered a more blatant attack. On December 12, a Molotov cocktail set his house on fire. “My wife was awoken by our cat, who wanted to get outside, and she heard the shattering of glass against our garage and saw that it had been set on fire,” Jovanovic said. The flames quickly enveloped the entire house. But as they tried to leave, attackers in a car on the street fired at the front door. They managed to make it out safely.

Jovanovic is a retired policeman who decided to go into journalism to help out his friend, editor Zeljko Martovic of the independent news site Zig Info: “I was good at procuring documents,” he said. His main target was the mayor of Grocka, Dragoljub Simonovic, who Jovanovic alleges was involved in corrupt gas distribution contracts and other public tenders managed by the local SNS branch. Days after Jovanovic and his wife moved to an apartment in Belgrade after their house was destroyed, someone tried to break into their new home—this time while both of them were awake. It’s “become common for us now,” Jovanovic told me. The unknown individual fled.

Vucic downplayed the attack on Jovanovic at Davos, saying people shouldn’t rush to judgement, and that the attack might have been “just another break in.” Jovanovic saw the tepid statement as a green light to all those who want to attack journalists. “It’s like he’s drawing a bull’s eye on their foreheads,” he said.

Around the same time Jovanovic’s apartment was broken into, Dasko Milinovic, a radio journalist from the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad, and part of a popular online radio duo, was called into the police for a tweet he had posted a couple of days ago on his parody account on Twitter. The satirical tweeter takes on the persona of a pro-Western nationalist, Zapad Todorovic—Zapad means “West” in Serbian—in many ways mirroring Vucic’s own transformation, and mimics the rhetoric Vucic uses in his public addresses and statements. Pro-government trolls are common in the Serbian Twittersphere. “My goal with Zapad was to make fun of religious conservatives, the far right, historical revisionists, and they started writing back,” said Milinovic, who consciously uses the language of Serbian nationalists, Colbert-style, to mock them and their policies. In a tweet on December 19th, Milinovic lampooned SNS politician Vladimir Djukanovic for supporting the activities of the Serbian neo-Nazi group “Srbska Akcija,” which had spray-painted the walls of leftist politician Marinika Tepic’s house. “Will the Nazi swine complain if we talk to him the way he talks to others? You fascist boar, you’ll roast on the spit.” Djukanovic reported the tweet to the police, saying Milinovic—despite posting from a clear parody account—had threatened him.

After willingly going to the police station, Milinovic was arrested and held overnight for “threatening the safety of a political representative”—something Milinovic found absurd. The SNS government, he told me, “is prepared to wage a war against even the most marginal and insignificant people in Serbian society, as long as they have a small slice of public attention or following.”

The day after the Davos panel, the EU’s enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn posted a photograph with Vucic on Twitter, calling 2018 “successful” year for the Western Balkans. Hahn has argued in the past that continuing the EU accession process is the best antidote to any lingering authoritarian ailments in the region. He has also provoked controversy in the past by echoing rhetoric often used by Vucic and his supporters—calling for proof of concerted efforts by the government to stifle the press.

After the past month, such calls feel offensive to some Serbian journalists. Amidst the attack on Jovanovic, the cancelling of Ivanovic’s show, and Milinovic’s arrest, a memo to staff in the Air Serbia lounge in Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla airport leaked in late December, urging vigilance about the type of media available in the waiting area for the government-owned airline. “Pay special attention to NIN, Vreme and Nedeljnik and newspapers of similar content. They should not be exhibited,” the memo read.

What’s the best way to fight terrorism? As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and Syria, shifting from the unending War on Terror to the no less unending “Great Power competition” with China and Russia, a definitive answer to that question remains as elusive as it was when the U.S. dropped its first advance team north of Kabul in 2001. 

Countries in the Middle East, however, continue to suffer more terrorist attacks each year than any other region. And from gender norms to organized crime, researchers have begun identifying a host of seemingly unlikely factors influencing terror networks’ growth. 

This month, a new study from Michael Marcusa in CUNY’s Comparative Politics journal suggested a particularly unusual area to focus on: labor unions. Marcusa looked at two towns in Tunisia that both appear to be perfect recruiting grounds for extremism, but have seen dramatically different outcomes.

On the surface, the towns of Métlaoui and Sidi Bouzid are much the same. Both have sizable populations for Tunisian towns: 38,129 and 48,284 people, respectively. Both have high unemployment levels: 21.72 percent in Sidi Bouzid and 35.48 percent in Métlaoui. Most worryingly from a counter-terror perspective, people between 20 and 40 years old make up over 80 percent of the unemployed in both towns. Despite these similarities, they have taken remarkably different trajectories.

After the Arab Spring, sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid, jihadist-salafists were successful in taking over the mosques of the town, installing imams who helped spread an extremist ideology with real-world impact. Sidi Bouzid became a prominent exporter of Tunisian terrorist recruits: An analysis of Islamic State border documents by Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found 23 of the Islamic State’s foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria originated in Sidi Bouzid, with only one coming from Métlaoui. Of those killed in Syria, Zelin found 12 fighters came from Sidi Bouzid, and none from Métlaoui.

In Métlaoui, despite bleak economic prospects, the ideological revolution that took place in Sidi Bouzid failed to materialize. Extremists existed in the town, but the local population mostly didn’t find their ideology appealing: When jihadi-salafists tried to take over a large mosque in the town, Marcusa found, they were seen off by a posse of sword-brandishing residents. So what makes Métlaoui special?

Métlaoui has been a mining town ever since large phosphate deposits, commonly used in fertilizer, were discovered there in 1896. Following the breakdown of Tunisia’s tribal system under French colonial land reforms, the new mine rebound the old clans around their shared interest in the jobs the state-owned mine could generate. And that, in turn, led to what Marcusa thinks may have been a pivotal development: Over time, Métlaoui workers created unions and syndicates to represent their interests—effectively developing systems of opposition that challenged authority in a way that wasn’t possible in Sibid Bouzid. Unlike other towns, where resistance to colonial authority meant violence and banditry, Métlaoui’s residents developed a more restrained approach—using negotiation and strategy to seek concessions. A 1930s folk poem from Métlaoui lauds this approach with the line “Oh how sweet the strike is, for we’ve come and taken our right with it!” Productive and peaceful modes of rebellion which yield concrete results, Marcusa told me, make all the difference: “The fundamental thing which seems to stem the tide of jihadism is the idea of trying to go directly for securing material benefits rather than more symbolic benefits.”

In the present day, the memory of Métlaoui’s organizing history has led to nonviolent forms of resistance, despite a high unemployment rate. In 2018, dozens of unemployed youth blockaded the phosphate mine, demanding jobs and voicing frustration with the mine’s hiring practices. The protestors shut down production for six weeks which led the Tunisian government to suspend 1,700 prospective hires in an attempt to ease tensions. These “strikes,” according to Marcusa, are influenced by the same activism these young people had seen their parents engage in.

“You have to understand that you’re talking to someone who’s looking for a fight,” Marcusa said. “One way they can fight is through the jihadi way and one way they can fight is through actually organizing, putting out demands, and negotiating and trying to actually do something productive. So the challenge is helping them have the conflict in the most productive way, for both them and society.”

To show a clear trend, Marcusa would ideally want to find towns to compare the Métlaoui/Sidi Bouzid divergence to outside Tunisia. But that’s difficult to do in other areas struggling with Jihadi-Salafism, as the labor movement has traditionally been repressed in those countries. Unlike Tunisia, where 670,000 workers went on strike just last week, other countries across the Middle East do not have the same unbroken history of labor activism.

In oil-rich Iraq, the country that in 2017 suffered more terrorist attacks than any other nation, one would expect to find many Métlaoui-type towns: Iraq has a long labor history, with union support instrumental to its independence in 1958. However, the labor movement there is only recently showing signs of strength and rebirth after a long period of suppression under Saddam Hussein, as well as the flood of corruption and mismanagement that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003. 

Iraq’s sweeping changes to its labor laws in 2015, including the country’s first sexual harassment protections and reinstating the formerly banned right to strike, represent progress. But Saddam’s shadow remains–the continued prohibition of unionizing among civil servants means it’s still not living up to the International Labor Organization standards of freedom of association it ratified in June 2018. Considering that Iraq’s public sector employs over 40 percent of the country’s working age population, that represents a significant number of silenced voices.

Labor unions’ effectiveness in Iraq can be illustrated by the enemies they have made. Soon after the invasion of Iraq, Hadi Saleh, the head of the newly-formed Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU)–its largest union federation–was murdered by insurgents in his home. When ISIS invaded Mosul in 2014, they stormed IFTU offices. Years of U.S. State Department Human Rights reports show the labor movement sounding the alarm on the Iraqi state’s deep corruption. The same reports show multiple instances of the state interfering with union work and in many cases raiding union offices.

“[Iraq’s unions] are used to shouting—not in a bad way, but loudly—in order to inform the government: We are your friends. We are not your enemy. We want to work with you in order to build democracy, in order to have proper industries that work for everybody,” said Abdullah Muhsin, an activist in Iraq’s post-war labor movement who is now an international officer for the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) in the UK.

To Muhsin, the nonsectarian nature of union organizing is a clear antidote to the divisions that have riven the country. The government’s anti-union stance is, among other things, an obstacle in fighting extremism. “If unions were allowed to do their job and be considered as a partner,” Muhsin told me, “we would not have seen these problems. Because unions are working from below, they are workers, they are in factories, in schools, in communities, they have eyes everywhere.”

Muhsin isn’t alone in thinking strong civic organizations can make a difference fighting extremism. During the Obama Administration, a core pillar of “Countering Violent Extremism” or CVE, (the catch-all term for addressing terrorism’s root causes) was the need to strengthen civil society, from women’s groups to marginalized communities and organized labor. The term “civil society” has cropped up in  every president’s national security strategy post 9/11. What the term lacks is specificity—where exactly to focus in civil society. And that’s the gap studies like Marcusa’s seek to fill.

Heba El-Shazli, a professor at George Mason University’s School of Policy, Government and International Affairs (SPGIA) said that the lack of attention to unions today differs from policy in previous decades, citing U.S. support for the Solidarity movement in Poland during the Cold War. A 28-year veteran of international labor issues, El-Shazli lamented unionism’s relative absence from today’s foreign policy debate, “It’s really outrageous that it’s just not on the radar. It really is.” She wonders whether the overall decline of unions as a power in American society today means that policymakers no longer consider their strengths overseas. If so, however, that’s “short-sighted,” she told me.

It’s too simplistic to say that more union activity will vanquish extremism in the Middle East, but there’s ample evidence at this point that this and similar approaches might help. Inserting these findings into foreign policy is a matter of politics. Republican administrations have not traditionally been strong union supporters, but such recent research might interest the ascendant and vocal progressive wing of the Democratic party, who have previously been criticized for being insufficiently focused on international affairs.

Encouraging countries explicitly to support their unions might seem to some like a pie in the sky idea. But after almost $6 trillion spent on an unwinnable war, and with ever-decreasing appetite in the United States for military solutions, surely it’s worth trying something new.