Group items tagged

. I am disturbed that 20 percent of any sample would justify violence as a legitimate response to an offensive speaker. But I have seen enough surveys to know that you can get 20 percent of a sample to agree with pretty much anything.

Almost all of these survey results are in agreement in two findings: Americans are still more dedicate to protecting free speech than other countries; College-educated citizens are far more likely to defend freedom of speech than less-educated citizens.

let me be candid: Just as I think everyone was too hasty in trumpeting this latest survey, I do not want everyone coming to the opposite conclusion because of this column. Villasenor’s findings warrant some follow-up polling. If his results are substantiated in more rigorous follow-up research, I will be greatly concerned.

what concerns me far more right now is the eagerness with which columnists seized on these findings as vindicating their preconceived belief that today’s college students are just the worst. One of the common laments of modern pundits is that today’s college kids are snowflakes who rely on feelings more than logic to jump to conclusions. But it is the commentators who are leveling critiques against today’s college students by relying on arguments as well organized as a Berkeley free speech week. They are the ones who failed to look more closely at a result that they so badly wanted to be true.

Their comedy counterpart Ricky Gervais has managed to monetise this notion spectacularly, saying the things that he is apparently not allowed to say, on a variety of global media platforms, for millions of dollars, with the full co-operation and approval of the legal representatives of the institutions on which, and about which, he says the things he is not allowed to say, his functionally adequate standup act having been overpromoted worldwide off the back of his pitch-perfect contribution to the ground-breaking Office sitcom two decades ago.

In the Daily Mail, Sarah Vine ripped the lid off the rotting kitchen food waste bin of her mind to retch forth some choice owl pellets of praise for Gervais’s performative outrage. For Vine, Gervais was “a knight in shining armour, saviour of humanity, saviour of comedy, restorer of sanity and… undisputed Wokefinder General”

Clarkson, Turds and the Wokefinder General are narcissistic populists, all clever enough to know better, who continue to court the attention of angry impotent people and take no personal responsibilty for the consequences of their words, other mortals merely collateral damage, rabbits churned up in the combine harvester blades of their ongoing ambitions.

A Ricky Gervais Netflix standup special walks into a pub with a massive pile of stinking dogshit on its shoulder. The barman says: “Where did you get that massive pile of dogshit?” And the dogshit says: “Netflix. They’ve got bloody loads of them!”

Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?

The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence

fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.

Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry

The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.

no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online

In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.

With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign

young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos

These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything

it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.

Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle

Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.

The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.

There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.

At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.

Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.

In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.

The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.

Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak

2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.

The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.

Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.

That, in a nutshell, is the credo of today’s high-profile conservatives: Say anything to “trigger” the “libtards” and “snowflakes.” The dumber and more offensive, the better

On policy, however, Trump the president has differed from Trump the candidate. The candidate pledged to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He suggested spending billions on infrastructure. And he promised to “eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors.”

None of these have come to pass.

Underneath the extra-obvious demagoguery and incompetence, one year of Trump has been largely the same as one year of President Rubio or Bush or Cruz would have been. Where candidate Trump’s views on key issues differed from the GOP, President Trump has gotten on board.

And, crucially, Trump’s so-called foes in Congress reflect this gap between rhetoric and reality. Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) have sparred publicly with the president, yet they have remained reliable votes for the White House’s initiatives.

In policy terms, though, on what major issue would Romney oppose the president? They agree on taxes, health care, immigration and so on. A Sen. Romney would be a reliable vote for the Trump agenda — because it is the Republican agenda.

Republicans will nonetheless struggle to distance themselves because the past year has proved that Trumpism and Republicanism are fundamentally the same. A vote for one is a vote for both.

Buttigieg also grasps the deep purposes of politics. As he put it in his speech announcing his withdrawal from the campaign: My faith teaches that the world is not divided into good people and bad people; [it teaches] that all of us are capable of good and bad things. Today, more than ever, politics matters, because leaders can call out either what is best in us or what is worst in us; can draw us either to our better or to our worst selves. Politics at its worst is ugly, but at its best politics can lift us up. It is not just policy making; it is moral. It is soul craft.

Buttigieg seemed to understand intuitively what the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln understood, which is that the role of political leaders is to filter and refine public passions, rather than to stoke them; to be alert to the threat posed by angry populism; and to keep at bay institutional arsonists. In that sense, Pete Buttigieg is a person of quite a conservative disposition.

To paraphrase James Madison in “Federalist No. 51,” the end of politics is justice. (Aristotle argued very much the same thing.)

Politics, then, is one arena, and a rather important one, that helps shape a nation’s norms, beliefs, and moral sensibilities. It signals to the rest of society what kind of behavior is honorable and dishonorable, admirable or ignoble, worthy of emulation or condemnation.

It is here, in the realm of our civic and political culture, where the blast radius of the Trump presidency is most obvious, and where Donald Trump is doing some of his worst and most-lasting damage.

The most important revolution of all, the conservative British statesman Edmund Burke said, was a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.” In that respect, Trump is a revolutionary, in a way that ought to alarm conservatives.

For months, Trump himself referred to the illness as “the coronavirus.” In early March, though, several conservative media figures began using Wuhan virus or Chinese virus instead. On March 16, Trump himself began to refer to it as the “Chinese Virus,” prompting commentators to charge that he was racializing the epidemic

Even before Trump’s adoption of Chinese virus, Asian Americans had been facing a wave of discrimination, harassment, and violence in response to the epidemic. The president’s rhetoric did not start this backlash, but the decision to embrace the term Chinese virus reinforced the association between a worldwide pandemic and people of a particular national origin.

Legitimizing that link with all the authority of the office of the president of the United States is not just morally abhorrent, but dangerous.

The president’s now-constant use of Chinese virus is the latest example of a conservative phenomenon

Trump and his acolytes are never more comfortable than when they are defending expressions of bigotry as plain common sense, and accusing their liberal critics of being oversensitive snowflakes who care more about protecting “those people” than they do about you. They seek to reduce any political dispute to this simple equation whenever possible.

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

n this instance, though, the gambit served two additional purposes: distracting the public from Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and disguising the fact that Trump’s failures stemmed from his selfishness and fondness for authoritarian leaders, which in turn made him an easy mark for the Chinese government’s disinformation

Trump understands that overt expressions of prejudice draw condemnation from liberals, which in turn rallies his own base around him. Calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” not only informs Trump’s base that foreigners are the culprits, it also offers his supporters the emotional satisfaction of venting fury at liberals for unfairly accusing conservatives of racism.

Since that report, Chinese officials have engaged in a propaganda offensive, expelling American journalists, minimizing their early missteps, and putting forth a conspiracy theory that the virus was engineered by the U.S. military. Compared with all this, the president’s defenders argue, Trump referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” seems trivial.

The point is to turn a pandemic that threatens both mass death and the collapse of the American economy into a culture-war argument in which the electorate can be polarized along partisan lines.

Lost in that comparison, however, is the fact that the most effective target of CCP disinformation has been Trump himself.

According to The Washington Post, at the same time that Trump was stating that Beijing had the disease under control, U.S. intelligence agencies were already warning him that “Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.”

Administration officials directly warned Trump of the danger posed by the virus, but “Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China,” The Washington Post reported, “despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”

The right’s rhetorical shift then, is not just another racism rope-a-dop

It is also an attempt to cover up the fact that the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign was effective in that it helped persuade the president of the United States not to take adequate precautionary measures to stem a tide of pestilence that U.S. government officials saw coming.

Now faced with the profound consequences of that decision, the right has settled on a strategy that does little to hold Beijing accountable for its mishandling of the coronavirus, but instead plays into Beijing’s attempt to cast any criticism of the Chinese government’s response as racism

The term makes no distinction between China’s authoritarian government and people who happen to be of Chinese origin, and undermines the unified front the Trump administration would want if it were actually concerned with countering Chinese-government propaganda.

Instead, the Trump administration has chosen a political tactic that strengthens the president’s political prospects by polarizing the electorate, and covers up his own role as Xi’s patsy, while making its own pushback against CCP propaganda less effective

This approach reflects the most glaring flaws of Trumpist governance, which have become only more acute during the coronavirus crisis: It exacerbates rather than solves the underlying problem, placing the president’s political objectives above all other concerns, even the ones both the president and his supporters claim to value.