Senate Television/AP

Ken Starr, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks during the impeachment trial against Mr. Trump in the Senate in Washington, Monday, Jan. 27, 2020.

The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is full of references from both sides to evidence, due process, the Constitution, and of course, fairness.

But it’s important to realize that this is not a trial in the sense of the TV classic “Law & Order,” but a hybrid – part courtroom presided over by the chief justice, and much more a political arena.

Senators sit as jurors and judges. Hardly sequestered, they run to the cameras during breaks to hold dueling press conferences. And they set their own rules, which they can also change.

“An impeachment trial was never meant to be a real trial,” says Ray Smock, former historian for the U.S. House of Representatives. It is a constitutional process taking place in a political environment, a “power play” between the executive and legislative branches, he says.

“Once power is involved,” he adds, “you can’t escape political machinations.”

Nowhere is this judicial and political mixture more consequential than on the issue of witnesses.

Democrats desperately want to call them, as well as subpoena documents, in order to bolster their allegation that the president shook down a foreign leader – withholding military aid and a White House meeting, for his own political benefit. They pound the point that a trial has witnesses, and to be fair, this trial must also have them.

But the Constitution is silent on this question – and pretty skimpy on instructions for impeachment generally.

“Because this is not a trial, there is no guarantee of witnesses,” says Mr. Smock.

Senators have agreed to vote on whether to have witnesses, probably on Friday. They wanted to wait for both sides to finish their presentations, which now have concluded, and for senators to ask questions of the two teams on Wednesday and Thursday. In a chamber controlled by 53 Republicans, Democrats need four Republicans to split from the pack if they want witnesses.

Just days ago, such prospects seemed to be fading. But like lightning, new information fell from the sky, electrifying Washington and recharging Democrats’ hopes. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that in his forthcoming book, former national security adviser John Bolton writes that the president told him that military aid to Ukraine was contingent on that government investigating Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Mr. Trump denies having said that to Mr. Bolton.

The president’s defense team has steadily maintained there was no link between the aid and the investigations.

The manuscript leak prompted Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah to tell reporters Monday that it’s “increasingly likely” that more Republicans will join those who want to hear from Mr. Bolton – a top witness choice for Democrats because of his first-hand knowledge of the president’s stated intentions. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) also said in a statement that reports about the book “strengthen the case for witnesses” and have prompted “conversations” among her colleagues. Other Republicans say they want to see the manuscript.

Witness quid pro quo?

The witness issue is fraught with risk for both sides. First, there’s no telling where witnesses might go, even if they are deposed first, as agreed on by the senators. Second, if the Senate goes down this road, the GOP majority could vote for witnesses politically harmful to the Democrats.

One possibility floated by Republicans is a witness deal, perhaps John Bolton for the Democrats and Hunter Biden for the president. But Democrats shot down that idea, saying he wasn’t a material witness (not to mention the political damage that calling him might heap on his father’s presidential campaign).

Absent a deal, and if enough Republicans vote for witnesses, the president could exert executive privilege to block certain witnesses from testifying. The White House is warning of a long, litigious battle if witnesses are subpoenaed.

With new information dribbling out as the days wear on, it’s in the president’s interest to wrap this trial up quickly, preferably before the State of the Union address next week.

Meanwhile, four Democratic presidential candidates are locked inside the Senate just as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are about to break.

Yet the court-battle scenario is “a lot of chaff being put in the air,” counters Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware. The Constitution empowers the Senate as the sole body to try the president. If it voted to issue a subpoena, it would be signed by the presiding officer of the impeachment trial – Chief Justice John Roberts.

“I would argue [that] is not reviewable” in the courts, Senator Coons says.

Some Republican senators argue that witnesses are not necessary because the charges against the president – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – do not rise to the level of impeachment.

That’s what was argued Monday by Mr. Trump’s celebrity defense attorneys, constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose investigation sparked the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The former president was acquitted by the Senate 20 years ago.

‘Age of impeachment’

With professorial flourish, Mr. Dershowitz rewound history to argue that the constitutional criteria for impeaching, convicting, and removing a president – “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” – were intended to mean offenses that were “criminal-like.” Were that not the case, he argued, a long list of presidents from George Washington to George H.W. Bush might have been impeached for “abuse of power.”

The president’s lawyers maintain he committed no crime, that there was no “quid pro quo,” and that his temporary hold on military aid was related to corruption and burden-sharing.

Mr. Starr warned that America is living in an “age of impeachment,” with the tool “weaponized” against presidents from Nixon, to Clinton, and now Mr. Trump. Indeed, the House impeachment vote in December fell almost entirely along party lines, with only three Democrats siding with Republicans in opposition, and no Republicans voting to impeach. Mr. Starr pointed to Britain, from which the United States inherited the impeachment process. Parliament stopped using impeachment after 1868 because the process failed to meet the modern standards of “fairness,” he said.

Fairness is an issue constantly raised by both sides in this trial. It dominated the first full day of deliberations, when senators debated the rules, and continues still. Were this a courtroom trial, with established rules and procedures, there would be far fewer cries of outrage, say government and legal experts.

Bernadette Meyler, a constitutional scholar at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, points out that even though witnesses are not a constitutional necessity in this trial, it’s what people generally expect – “a moral fairness” she says, if not a “legal requirement.” Two-thirds of Americans (66%) believe the Senate should call in new witnesses, according to an ABC-Washington Post poll released at the end of last week.

“Fairness is what the Senate decides,” said former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), who dropped by the trial last week. Unless Republicans break ranks, those decisions will be determined by the GOP majority, with both sides – and the nation – having to reckon with the consequences.

There is most certainly gold under Ned Blackmon’s feet. 

For months now, a rumbling carousel of rock trucks and backhoes expands the already expansive open pit mine at the 4,600-acre Haile Gold Mine here in Kershaw. The hunt for tiny specks of gold hidden deep in the Southern slate has sparked a gold rush among prospectors eyeing surrounding land – including Mr. Blackmon’s farm.

The rush to revive one of America’s oldest gold mines was only bolstered last week when the Trump administration replaced the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule with the Navigable Waters Protection rule. The revision reduces federal oversight over the ephemeral headwaters that feed into larger rivers and lakes, and ultimately Americans’ drinking water.

The Environmental Protection Agency once opposed OceanaGold's plans to expand the Haile Mine out of fear it would pollute over 1,000 acres of wetlands. Now federal regulators may not have oversight over much of it.

Mr. Blackmon, a local farmer who has been approached about selling his land to the mine, sees the stakes plain as dirt.

He removes a weathered newspaper from his truck visor. Dated 2014, the front page article in The State describes a legacy of pollution that even small mines leave behind – and the massive tab left to taxpayers by companies that promised environmental restoration.

“There is no doubt that this mine is going to affect our groundwater,” says Mr. Blackmon. “But that money, it talks.”

The rule change formalized last Thursday is part of a broader dismantling of federal environmental oversight by the Trump administration. Writ broadly, the shift underway is an experiment in environmental federalism that pushes regulation closer to the people – but also leaves it more vulnerable to powerful corporate lobbyists.

“Environmental federalism gets cloaked in the language and rhetoric of constitutional law, but it’s really a simpler, more pragmatic concept: Who is responsible for cleaning up a toxic waste landfill that’s reached into a nearby river?” says law professor Cale Jaffe, director of the Environmental and Regulatory Law Clinic at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Is it the local government that allowed the landfill through zoning? Is it the state, which issued the permit? Or is it the federal government, which established the hazardous waste standards?”

OceanaGold’s country director, David Thomas, says the main effect of the rule change will be more clarity around permitting. But he says that the mine will remain under “profound regulations” that fit into an evolving business model that mandates environmental stewardship and transparency as core corporate values. In the last two decades especially, he says, “the industry has seen a significant shift in terms of that attitude.”

For OceanaGold, he says, that means zero discharge operations from its processing plant, preservation of miles of pristine streams, and a $65 million restoration fund for when the mine closes in an estimated 15 years.

“Every industry has bad actors, so it is incumbent on us to stick decisively to our values, particularly when it comes to environmental and operational integrity,” says Mr. Thomas. “If we don’t, it will have an adverse impact on what we do.”

Federal oversight, in essence, provides a floor for water and air quality, allowing states and local communities to exceed those standards if they wish.

At the same time, “in a lot of states you have industry pushing to limit state authority to only what is provided at the federal level, which makes [taking away federal oversight] a bait and switch,” says Kelly Hunter Foster, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance.

“The federalism balance is important, where there is a strong federal stance, support for states, and then an engaged citizenry pushing back on the other side against industry ... to minimize impacts to people downstream,” says Ms. Hunter Foster. “That’s really the original common law of how you’re supposed to do things: You can use your land to the extent that it doesn’t harm others.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

A streak of gold buried in a layer of slate extends from Virginia to Georgia. In the early 19th century, miners discovered gold here at Lynches River. The Trump administration last week removed federal protections from parts of the watershed that feeds Lynches River.

A new gold rush

Many of the miners who flocked to California during the gold rush first dipped their pans in Carolina waters like Lynches River, the genesis of the Haile Mine. But modern-day pit mining also unearths toxic wastes, including cyanide, arsenic, and sulfuric acid.

President Donald Trump has stated that “crystal clear” waters are a goal of his administration. But earlier this month he chided the Obama-era rule as one “that basically took your property away from you.” (The rule required landowners to seek permits for changes that would affect seasonal, standing, and unconnected waters, as well as some headwater streams and wetlands.)

Key beneficiaries are golf course developers like Mr. Trump, farmers like Mr. Blackmon, and extractors – like the OceanaGold outfit here in Kershaw.

“If it’s not farmed, it’s mined,” says Chris Smith, executive director of the Mining Association of South Carolina, in Chapin. “And anytime that something to do with the waters of our state is granted more leniency so we can do our job, that is very beneficial to us.”

The U.S. has as many as half a million abandoned mine sites, of which at least 33,000 have degraded the environment around them, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. South Carolina has two smaller mines that are now part of federal Superfund cleanups after waste contaminated surrounding wetlands.

Obama administration officials said the rule was intended to clarify legal confusion sown in part by two separate U.S. Supreme Court decisions on whether the federal government could regulate smaller and more seasonal bodies of water on private land.

The Trump administration peeled back that rule against the advice of its own scientific advisory board, laying the groundwork for lawsuits by states and environmental groups.

“This modernization is a retreat,” says Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School in South Royalton. “Their best argument is, let the states take care of this.”

There is one overarching problem with the federalist approach to water regulation, he says. Flowing waters pay no heed to political boundaries. And depending on geography and political leanings, states have wildly different priorities when it comes to environmental protection.

“States are not stepping up to fill the gaps on nonpoint pollution,” which includes agricultural and mining interests, adds Professor Parenteau. “That’s why we have more and more dead zones all over the place and stinky, filthy, algae-choked waters, simply because the Clean Water Act is not strong enough now. The response [from the Trump administration] is to weaken it further.”

Tricky calculus

Federal oversight of U.S. waters began with the 1972 Clean Water Act, enacted after industrial pollution had caused rivers and lakes to catch fire for nearly a century before a Cuyahoga River fire in 1969 galvanized the environmental movement.

Today, Gallup regularly finds that having swimmable and fishable water near one’s home ranks as Americans’ top environmental concern. Plumbing some 50 million water quality measurements from 240,000 monitoring sites, a recent study found that the probability that U.S. surface waters are unsafe for fishing fell by about 13 percentage points, from a 28% chance to 15% chance, between 1972 and 2014. But looked at another way, about half of U.S. rivers and lakes are violating one or more federal water quality standards.

”Right now, we don’t know how much is being regulated or deregulated, and we also don’t know much about the consequences of the new rule,” says resource economist Joseph Shapiro, who studies the impacts of water pollution at the University of California, Berkeley. “But where you get your water matters.”

But those complexities and uncertainties around how watersheds work can get glossed over when measured against the immediate economic impact: By one estimate, the Haile Mine generates some $87 million a year in Lancaster County alone, employing over 600 locals.

For miners like Steven Dabbs, the new regulations are likely a huge boon. The mine has brought a raft of high-paying jobs to Lancaster County, not far from Charlotte, North Carolina.

“The pace is ferocious, but the pay is good,” he says – as much as $19 per hour for a rookie miner, he estimates.

But it’s not just a struggling old textile town like Kershaw welcoming the economic boost from looser regulations on water quality.

The Trump administration has also been giving extensions to liberal-leaning cities that entered consent decrees to fix up inadequate sewage treatment plants. That effort is being led by social justice activists who complain that the federally ordered cleanups are pushing up water bills, disproportionately affecting poor people.

The difficulties of measuring the benefits versus the costs of clean water remain at the core of how the U.S. safeguards its most precious resource in a deregulatory era.

“Until the 1970s, the Potomac River had long struggled with unregulated discharges of pollution that were creating this stench rolling by the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial,” says Professor Jaffe at the University of Virginia. “We didn’t get out of that problem by voluntary measures. That was a pretty progressive federal response to a real crisis. There’s now a risk of forgetting how we got out of that mess.”

Mike Roddy prefers to watch women’s basketball. 

He and his wife Nancy drove almost three hours from their home in Mason City on Sunday to watch the University of Iowa’s women’s basketball team play Michigan State on their home court in Iowa City. The Hawkeyes are in the middle of the second-longest active home game winning streak in women’s Division I basketball, and they’ve been breaking attendance records. 

Women share the ball instead of showing off – they “play the game as it’s meant to be played,” says Mr. Roddy. “It’s a skills game for them.”  

“That’s the same reason Amy will be better,” says his wife, referring to Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, whom the Roddys plan to support in next Monday’s Iowa caucuses. “She has the skills.” 

The Roddys aren’t alone in their belief that a woman may possess the best skill set to be president. Senator Klobuchar and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have won some of the most coveted editorial board endorsements this cycle – The Quad-City Times and New Hampshire Union Leader for Ms. Klobuchar, and The Des Moines Register for Senator Warren. The New York Times, unable to decide, gave its nod to both of them.

Yet as is the case with basketball, much of the attention and money has seemed to flow to the men. After leading in the polls for a time this fall, Ms. Warren has slipped into fourth place in most surveys, while Ms. Klobuchar, despite showing hints of momentum, is even further behind.

In interviews, dozens of Democrats in Iowa cite electability, or the ability to beat President Donald Trump, as their top priority. And for many, that criteria seems to be steering them toward a male candidate – a way of thinking that experts on women in politics characterize as both unsubstantiated and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to a crowd in a middle school gym in Davenport, Iowa on Jan. 26. “Can we just address it right here? Women win,” she said to a cheering crowd.

“In an era of Trump, we’re particularly vulnerable to that sort of narrative,” says Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at Emily’s List, a political action committee that works to elect pro-choice Democratic women to office. Ms. Reynolds points out that the Democrats have already made history by having not one but two women who are considered viable at this point in the cycle. “I think what’s particularly impressive about what Senator Klobuchar and Senator Warren have done is they have pushed past that. They are still in there fighting.”

At the same time, many women voters, particularly younger ones, say gender simply isn’t a primary factor in their decision. While they’re glad to have women in the running, they say they’re less motivated by symbolism or identity than by the candidates’ platforms – which, they say, is actually a sign of progress.

“It seems normal that a woman is running for president,” says Maggie Smith, a performing arts student at Iowa State University, who’s waiting to hear Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders speak in Ames with her friend and fellow student Joselyn Carrillo. They both like Ms. Warren, and Ms. Carrillo, an environmental studies student, muses about how empowering it would be to have a female president. But both plan to support Mr. Sanders when they caucus for the first time next week.

“Maybe that’s improvement, you know? That it’s coming down to the issues,” says Ms. Smith. 

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota speaks to a crowd at the Northwestern Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 26, before flying back to Washington for President Donald Trump's impeachment trial the next morning.

How much of a hurdle?

Going into the 2020 presidential cycle, a female Democratic nominee seemed like a strong if not likely possibility. Women’s political activism had skyrocketed, with millions of women pouring into the streets in 2017 for the Women’s March, estimated to be the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. The 2018 midterm elections saw a record number of Democratic women entering the U.S. House of Representatives, and the 2020 Democratic presidential field featured a record number of female candidates. 

Since then, however, the road to the White House for women has seemed increasingly paved with obstacles. Two promising female candidates – California Sen. Kamala Harris and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – were forced to drop out before the voting even began, after failing to gain traction.

Electability has long been a concern surrounding women, says Ms. Reynolds, even though statistically female politicians win their races at the same rate as men. And for many voters, those concerns seemed to grow in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.

Despite the fact that Mrs. Clinton actually won the popular vote, and despite the fact that the Democratic Party’s sample size of previous female presidential nominees is exactly one, many Democratic voters say they’re worried that gender could be the difference between winning and losing.

“When Hillary lost so abruptly, it knocked the wind out of everybody,” says Jenni Yenger, a retired school secretary, at a rally for former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in Fort Dodge. “I think Democrats would pull more for a woman [in 2020] if things weren’t so dire. I want to see a woman president, but not at the expense of losing to Trump.” 

Although she likes Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar, Ms. Yenger has concluded she’ll probably caucus for former Vice President Joe Biden because she “feels safer” with his chances of beating Mr. Trump. 

“If I could vote with my heart, I’d vote for Amy [Klobuchar] or Yang,” echoes Lisa Etzel, waiting in line in below-freezing temperatures to see Mr. Sanders in Ames, Iowa. “But I’m caucusing for Biden. I’m voting for who can beat Trump.”  

Both Ms. Warren and Ms. Klobuchar have, at various times, tried to tackle the electability issue head-on – attempting to turn it into an advantage. Ms. Klobuchar talks repeatedly about how, in her last election, she won 42 counties that had voted for President Trump.

At a house party in Johnston, Iowa, Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig says she was able to defeat a male incumbent in 2018 in part because Ms. Klobuchar was running at the top of the ticket. “If you can win in my district, you can win the Electoral College,” Representative Craig told a living room full of a dozen or so Iowa Democrats. “It’s really good to have Amy Klobuchar on the ticket in my kind of district.”

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig speaks to voters at a house party for Amy Klobuchar Thursday night in Johnston, Iowa. "I've been asked, 'What about a woman? Are we ready for a woman [president]?' says Representative Craig, who defeated an incumbent male Republican in the 2018 midterms. "Read the moment. It's suburban women who brought in 2018. We have an opportunity now to elect the first woman president of the United States."

Similarly, at the last Democratic debate in Des Moines, Ms. Warren pointedly noted that “the only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are women: Amy and me.”

“Can we just address it right here? Women win,” said Ms. Warren to a cheering crowd of voters in a middle school gym Sunday morning in Davenport. “We know that women candidates have been outperforming male candidates since Donald Trump got elected.” 

‘She stands on her record’

Yet Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren have had to walk a fine line when it comes to making gender a part of their campaigns. Many voters don’t like it when female candidates “play the woman card,” notes Kelly Winfrey, a professor at Iowa State University and research coordinator at its Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics.

At a “hot dish” house party in Newton, Iowa, on Friday, Ms. Klobuchar’s daughter Abigail Bessler tells the Monitor that when her mother first ran for Senate, “she didn’t say, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman.’” Ms. Bessler was campaigning on her mother’s behalf while the senator was stuck in Washington for President Trump’s impeachment trial. 

“She stands on her record,” says Ms. Bessler, “and that’s what she’s doing now.”

At other times, Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren have highlighted what they see as a double standard for female candidates. Ms. Warren made headlines recently when she claimed that Mr. Sanders had told her he believed that a woman could not win the White House.

Ms. Klobuchar spoke candidly in December about voters being far more willing to give male candidates a pass when it comes to experience, in a pointed dig at Mr. Buttigieg.

“They haven’t been afraid to call it out, and I think that bluntness has been good,” says Professor Winfrey. 

Still, for some Democratic voters, the idea of a woman president is a strong motivating factor. Mabe Wassell drove across the river from Illinois to see Ms. Warren speak in Davenport.

“I worry about anyone going against Trump, but [Warren] has the gravitas to do it,” she says.

Sitting beneath a plaque honoring Phebe Sudlow, who became the first female superintendent of a public school in the United States, Ms. Wassell recalls taking a bus full of her nieces and grandnieces to Washington for the Women’s March.

“I’m rock solid for Elizabeth because I want to see a woman president in my lifetime,” says Ms. Wassell. “That’s okay if that’s not a priority for anyone else. It is for me.” 

Al Drago/Reuters

The Pentagon logo is seen behind the podium in the briefing room at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, Jan. 8, 2020.

Truth, it is often said, is the first casualty of war, and in the wake of the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran on Jan. 3, misinformation ran rampant.

In the days following the U.S.-led drone strike, the White House’s rationales for the attack shifted wildly. Initially, the Trump administration claimed that the general was plotting an “imminent” attack against Americans. Less than a week later, it was to prevent an attack on a U.S. embassy, or four embassies. Or maybe it was U.S. military bases. In the end, “it doesn’t really matter,” the president tweeted, “because of [Soleimani’s] horrible past!”

At the same time, social networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook began to overflow with doctored photos and outdated images, false rumors about the draft, and fake tweets from administration officials. In one sense, this is nothing new; war fighting has always had a psychological component, which includes spreading lies. But in another sense, the informational fog speaks to the defining epistemological issue of our era: the fracturing of the American public’s shared sense of reality.

“The objective seems to be to question the idea that anything is certain,” says University of Southern California historian Nicholas Cull. “In a world of uncertainty, the only one you can trust is the strongest guy in the room.”

A fog of misinformation

One rumor claimed that the U.S. had instituted the draft. Another rumor claimed that LGBT people were exempt. Another claimed that felons were exempt. By the end of the day of the drone strike, the servers for the U.S. Selective Service System’s website had crashed.

“The two-day period after the news broke were very confusing to young people,” says Katy Byron, the editor and program manager of MediaWise, a Poynter Institute for Media Studies project aimed at helping teenagers identify online misinformation. 

Professor Cull points out that draft rumors are nothing new; a prevalent rumor in the spring of 1942 claimed Jews were exempt. But, he says, modern technology confounds our efforts to tell fact from fiction. “We’re living in one of those dangerous moments right now. [There is a] tremendous instability from the overlap of social media and big data-powered targeting of social media that we are in the process of learning to deal with.”

Programmed to spread

Misinformation on social media presents a thorny problem. Recommendation algorithms, like the kind that determine what appears in your Facebook newsfeed or YouTube’s “up next” list, cannot by themselves distinguish truth from lies. All they can do is measure how people “engage” with the content: whether they scroll past it or linger on it, whether they click on the thumbs, hearts, or other icons associated with the post, and how much time they spend interacting with it.

This algorithmic agnosticism often leads to perverse results. Social networks assign higher ranks to content that prompts more engagement, regardless of whether the content is true or whether it improves the engager’s life. And the more highly ranked a piece of content is, the more likely people will see it. That means that, if you come across a Facebook post that you think is false and you write a thoughtful point-by-point rebuttal of it, you’ve made it more likely that the misinformation will appear in more peoples’ Facebook news feeds.

What’s more, today’s media landscape is immeasurably more fragmented than it was in 1967. To reach its audience, misinformation – and its deliberate subset, disinformation – no longer needs to travel the highways afforded by the major news outlets; instead, it can travel the backroads created by niche targeting. That means that what you see may not be what everyone else, including professional fact-checkers, see.

“The beauty of freedom of speech, historically, is that the freedom of speech is constrained by the ability to observe and respond to problematic speech,” says Josh Pasek, a media professor at the University of Michigan. “The challenge in this social media environment is that you can’t necessarily do that.”

Professor Pasek suggests that one way for the government to curb misinformation without running afoul of free speech protections would be to require social media companies to be transparent about who is targeting what content to which users. 

“You don’t have the right to not have your speech known about just because you’re trying to hide it from someone,” he says.

How to respond?

If you spot misinformation in your news feed, one option, Professor Cull suggests, might be to go outside the infrastructure. In other words, if a friend posts a false news report on Twitter, instead of responding via Twitter and inadvertently boosting engagement to the original post, you could send that friend an email instead.

Ms. Byron of MediaWise, whose project is backed by Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, advises online readers to ask three simple questions: Who is behind the information? What is the evidence? And what are other sources saying?

If you’re still not sure, she says, you can tag the post with #IsThisLegit and @mediawise. “We’ll help you figure out if what you’re seeing is real or not,” she says.

Professor Cull says that the combination of rapid technological shifts and political instability places society in a dangerous situation, but, if we survive this moment, our minds will eventually adjust to the new media landscape, just as we adjusted to television and radio in the past.

“In a couple of years,” he says, “we’ll be able to look back on it and think, ‘Wow, can you imagine that we didn’t understand that? Now we understand it. It’s second nature. We can move beyond it.’”

On a dusty Cairo street at Souk Al Khayamiyya run seams and stitches holding together Egypt’s rich cultural tapestry.

Luxurious fabrics are delicately laid and interwoven to depict bright blue sparrows, a vase of flowers, geometric maze-like marvels, Quranic verses, and blessings to God.

But these aren’t displays meant for a palace or museum. They’re wall art for tents.

A walk along the roofed street of Souk Al Khayamiyya, literally the tent-makers market, between the buzzing motorbikes and puttering tuk-tuks, is a colorful journey through the cultures and civilizations that touched Egypt and the greater Islamic world.

From the row of workshops hang tapestries, banners, and pillows with geometric patterns, block inscriptions of Kufic Arabic, Turkish whirling dervishes, brilliant peacocks, pharaohs, and hieroglyphics. 

Tent-makers say these diverse eras, designs, and techniques – each requiring training and study – are a constant source of inspiration.

“Some might be more inspired by arabesque, others by animal designs, others are interested in calligraphy, and that is their art,” says Hossam Farouk, as he runs a thread through a villager’s hat on an Upper Nile village motif at his shop.

“But you can look at a blank canvas and take from any and all of these eras to create your own painting, your own tapestry, your own story that only you can tell.”

The art of Egyptian tent-making stretches back to the founding of Cairo itself.

The original Islamic capital in Egypt, founded by Islamic armies in the seventh century, was called Fustat, “the tent,” in an area that now lies in Old Cairo.

Moveable palaces

But it was with the arrival of the Fatimids and the foundation of new Cairo in the 10th century that tent-making art exploded.

The Fatimid rulers requested that local artisans stitch together colorful fabric paintings onto canvas to serve as an artistic interior to tents. The tent-makers, or khayamiyya, would use natural dyes for crimson reds and saffron for yellows. They even crushed Armenian beetles onto textiles from Egypt and silks further afield to produce bold and ornate panels that were cherished as much as gold.

The Fatimid – and later Kurdish Ayyubid – rulers would use these applique tapestries as a moveable palace, mobile grand halls they would take to the battlefield or onto Cairo’s streets to receive the public to celebrate religious holidays and military victories.

Forget DIY camping or lightweight tents with instruction guides. These massive, multi-chamber tents would take up to 100 camels to carry and dozens of men to set up, according to texts from the time.

The tent-makers were respected, influential – it was good to be a khayami. They eventually settled onto one street at the mouth of the Bab Zuwailah gate of Fatimid Cairo, where they remain today. 

The design of their tents changed in the 13th century with the rise to power of the Mamluks, a warrior class turned ruling class who favored intricately woven floral and vine-like designs known as arabesque in bold yellows, greens, and reds.

With the rise of the Ottomans, who took Cairo along with much of the Islamic world in the 16th century, tent art would transform once again.

These new Turkish rulers requested panels in more pastel colors, powder blue, teal, and rose, depicting flowers and animals not native to Egypt.

Cairo’s tent-makers were so renowned as skilled artisans, they were tasked to sew the intricate kiswah, the black cloths emblazoned in gold silk design and writings used to cover the Kaaba in Mecca. 

Every year at the time of the hajj, the sultan of Cairo would lead pilgrims and carry with him a new kiswah in a decorative caravan and complete a 1,000-mile journey on foot and camel to replace the previous year’s kiswah in Mecca in a grand ceremony.

The emergence of colonialism and European dominance in North Africa as the Ottomans receded marked another turning point for khayamiyya.

Taylor Luck

The colorful shops of Souk Al Khayamiyya in Old Cairo, Egypt, Dec. 18, 2019. The tentmakers market has occupied the same street for centuries.

Artistic revival

Many of Cairo’s tent-makers in this period shifted away from Islamic geometric or Ottoman floral patterns in favor of scenes that fit Western visitors’ romanticized images of Egypt: pharaohs, camels, sphinxes, scarabs, and hieroglyphics, peasants leading donkeys next to the river Nile.

Rather than an internalization of Orientalism, it was a shift born in practicality: With the lack of demand of the ruling class in the early 20th century, the khayamiyya turned to designs that would catch the eye of European tourists looking for an “exotic” souvenir.

But by mid-century, the art was largely forgotten; tent-makers were only called upon to stitch gaudy panels to be used for wedding parties or the backdrops for concerts.

Only recently has appreciation of khayamiyya been revived and their applique art reappraised.

In the past decade, Egypt’s ministry of culture has showcased khayamiyya artwork in traveling exhibitions and Islamic conferences; older panels are presented in museums as far away as Kuala Lumpur and Honolulu.

While they are no longer in need of royal reception halls, Cairenes are now returning to the tent-makers market for a more modest, but urgent, need: home furnishings.

Any time of the day, Cairo residents browse the market or special order designs for cushions, throws, pillows, and wall art for their homes, to spruce up the living room or dining room to impress guests ahead of Ramadan, New Year’s, or Eid.

It’s all in the stitching

To this day, it is a craft entirely handmade; tent masters trace out the design with chalk and have women from their family or the neighborhood cut or carry out the stitching or do the work themselves.

But make no mistake, no khayami is worth his salt unless he masters his stitchwork.

“You must train as an artist first, and then as a craftsman with your hands,” says Ahmed Fatooh, who followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the art at the age of 14. “You get one line off, a week’s work is lost.”

Just as it was in the 12th century, it takes a day for a simple geometric design, while more intricate, larger panels may take 30 days to finish.

Whether the client is a prince or a tourist, tent-makers abide by their ancient principle: you don’t rush a stitch.

“This is an art that you cannot rush; if you rush it shows in the stitchwork, the design, the symmetry,” Mr. Farouk says as he sews through a cloth bird beak.

“You cannot make a thousand years of art in a single day.”

AP

People protest for the release of activist Manzoor Pashteen in Karachi, Pakistan, Jan. 28.

Trained as a veterinarian, Manzoor Pashteen looks as if he wouldn’t hurt a flea. As the young founder of a civil rights group in Pakistan known as the Pashtun Protection Movement, he is also dedicated to keeping protests peaceful. In fact, after dozens of mass rallies over the past two years, his movement has bravely challenged the country’s powerful military to stop killing civilians in its war on armed groups.

Mr. Pashteen wants the army to honor the civic values of the constitution and protect the rights of the innocent in Pakistan’s battle with terrorists. Thousands of civilians have been lost through extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, or land mines installed by the military. His pacifist tactics not only speak to his civic demands but also draw popular support beyond his Pashtun community, Pakistan’s second-largest ethnic minority.

For all this, the military arrested Mr. Pashteen Monday on charges widely seen as bogus. He now faces the possibility of a life sentence.

Across much of the Muslim world, from Algeria to Iraq to Sudan, young people like Mr. Pashteen have taken to the streets over the past two years to demand better democracy from ruling elites and to change their country’s national identity. They generally want governance that is both inclusive and equal but also less corrupt and incompetent.

In Pakistan, that would require the military to stop holding itself up as the sole protector of Islamic nationalism and instead allow true civilian rule and basic rights. In Iraq and Lebanon, it means an end to divvying up political power by religious or ethnic groups. In Sudan and Algeria, it simply means getting the military to return to the barracks.

As the arrest of Mr. Pashteen shows, the pushback from these longtime rulers can be strong. In Iran and Iraq, hundreds of protesters have been killed over the past year. Yet the pushback also shows that the core ideas of the protesters – such as civilian protection or secular rule – are gaining legitimacy.

Rejecting the use of violence to defend their ideas, these movements are sustained by the appeal of their demand for a civic identity that promotes peace and unity across social divides. For people such as Mr. Pashteen, a person who has known only civilian killings for most of his life in Pakistan, that is the only choice.