right-wing Archives - Prindle Institute

July 11, 2019December 14, 2022

Concrete Milkshakes and the Ethics of Being Wrong on the Internet

In late June there was yet another clash of right-wing groups and protesters, this time in Portland, Oregon. As has been widely reported, in several previous clashes this year there have been incidents in which protesters threw milkshakes at members of extremist groups and right-wing politicians, most notably during an incident in May in which European Parliament member and Brexit supporter Nigel Farage was on the receiving end of a protester’s milkshake. While the person involved in the incident was arrested, Farage himself was not injured, merely embarrassed. During the recent events in Portland, however, the protesters upped the ante: as many news outlets, along with the Portland police department reported, instead of using regular milkshakes to embarrass members of the fringe extremist group “Proud Boys” [sic], protesters added powdered cement mix to the milkshakes, clearly with the intention to seriously injure their opposition. According to reports, several people called the Portland police to report the incident, after which they tweeted a warning to those attending the protest.

The only problem with the information tweeted out by police and reported by numerous right-wing news outlets? There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that it is true. Not a single word of it.

That blatant falsehoods like these are spread in this day and age is perhaps not surprising; we are perhaps even becoming desensitized to it. And while there are clearly ethical issues with spreading misinformation (some of which have been written before about on this site), what is perhaps just as problematic is the general response from those who have taken part in spreading that misinformation once it has been shown to be false.

It seems that the best thing to do when one has been shown to be wrong is to admit one’s mistake, and to retract one’s original claims. But this is not what we have generally seen happen in recent incidents online: it seems that instead of people admitting that they are wrong they will either quickly move on to the next thing, or else manipulate the narrative so that they can convince themselves that they were right the whole time. Both of these types of responses have been commonplace in response to the recent Portland protests.

Consider first Fox News, who originally ran the headline “Antifa, conservative protests turn violent as demonstrators throw milkshakes of quick-dry cement at police and onlookers.” Not typically known for their subtlety, this headline could not be any clearer, and not any more false. One might think that, upon learning one has printed a headline full of egregious errors, it would be one’s responsibility to set the record straight by issuing a retraction. But no such retraction was issued. Instead, the updated headline was quietly changed to read “Antifa-Proud Boys confrontation in Portland turns violent; conservative writer injured,” with the content altered only slightly: instead of claiming that milkshakes with cement mixed into them were, in fact, thrown, the article now states that “it was reported” that such milkshakes were thrown. This is no way constitutes a retraction of a demonstrably false claim, but instead still strongly implies that it was true. It is hard to see how these actions could constitute anything other than blatant dishonesty.

Philosophers have been writing about the dangers of intellectual dishonesty and carelessness in forming one’s beliefs for a long time. Philosopher W.K. Clifford, for example, discussed an example that sounds like it could have come straight out of today’s headlines, all the way back in 1877:

There was once an island in which some of the inhabitants professed a religion teaching neither the doctrine of original sin nor that of eternal punishment. A suspicion got abroad that the professors of this religion had made use of unfair means to get their doctrines taught to children. They were accused of wresting the laws of their country in such a way as to remove children from the care of their natural and legal guardians; and even of stealing them away and keeping them concealed from their friends and relations. A certain number of men formed themselves into a society for the purpose of agitating the public about this matter. They published grave accusations against individual citizens of the highest position and character, and did all in their power to injure these citizens in their exercise of their professions. So great was the noise they made, that a Commission was appointed to investigate the facts; but after the Commission had carefully inquired into all the evidence that could be got, it appeared that the accused were innocent. Not only had they been accused on insufficient evidence, but the evidence of their innocence was such as the agitators might easily have obtained, if they had attempted a fair inquiry. After these disclosures the inhabitants of that country looked upon the members of the agitating society, not only as persons whose judgment was to be distrusted, but also as no longer to be counted honourable men. For although they had sincerely and conscientiously believed in the charges they had made, yet they had no right to believe on such evidence as was before them. Their sincere convictions, instead of being honestly earned by patient inquiring, were stolen by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion. (Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief”)

Clifford says that it was morally wrong for the agitators to believe what they believed, because they formed their beliefs on shaky and little evidence, and that their beliefs were not the result of patient reflection and careful consideration, but rather “prejudice and passion.” Importantly for Clifford, such beliefs can still be held with complete sincerity – the agitators were not initially aware of the falsity of their beliefs, and they were confident that what they believed was true. Nevertheless, the way that they formed their beliefs still shows that they were doing something wrong.

One difference between Clifford’s case and contemporary events is that instead of today’s agitators being broadly considered untrustworthy and dishonorable, the consequences for being blatantly wrong on the internet are far less severe. In fact, the prejudice and passion that drive the careless acquisition of evidence, further encourages the manipulation of that evidence when confronted with conflicting evidence.

Consider again responses to the fabricated concrete milkshake story. Even after discovering that the story was false, one could find people reinterpreting the evidence to fit their preferred narrative. Consider the following representative tweets:

I’ve been getting a lot of emails telling me I’m stupid for adding to the concrete shake line. Lots have sent me a Portland Mercury article saying there’s no proof of concrete. Maybe so, but this is exactly how to do a kind of petulant terrorism. This makes Antifa terrorists.

This is the effect of concrete shakes, real or not: They tell people this will happen; they do things to make it look real; they maybe don’t even do it; then they accuse everyone of being stupid and gullible. Then they get much of the effect they want and get to do it again.

This kind of response again not only fails to constitute a retraction (nor does it recognize any kind of personal wrongdoing) but instead takes what evidence does exist – that some people claimed that there were concrete milkshakes at the rally – to support the conclusion that they held all along – that Antifa is a violent terrorist group. This is a disastrous leap in logic that not only runs afoul of Clifford’s principle that beliefs should be formed carefully, conscientiously, and on the basis of the best possible evidence, but goes the extra step of manipulating the evidence in such a way that supports one’s initial belief, even after having been proven wrong.

There are a lot of lessons we can take away from the recent events in Portland and the online responses to them, but perhaps one of the most important is to recognize that it is better to admit wrongdoing than to try at all costs to save face in light of overwhelming evidence. Spreading misinformation is harmful, but manipulating evidence to further the spread of misinformation that one knows perfectly well is false is perhaps even more harmful still.

May 22, 2019December 14, 2022

Christianity’s Role in Alt-Right Terrorism: More than an Aesthetic

In the wake of the April 27th, 2019 shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego County, California, fears of a rise in modern antisemitism continue to grow. The gunman that opened fire on the congregation’s Passover worship—killing 60-year-old Lori Kaye and wounding three others—posted an “open letter” filled with political conspiracies, racial slurs, biblical scripture, and Christian theology to the website 8chan shortly before the attack. The gunman’s rhetoric and motives classify him as a member of the alt-right: “a range of people on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy.”

For the most part, the internet is the primary radicalizing force for alt-right members. Website chat-rooms like 8chan and Gab, flaunting the value of free speech, attract people hoping to share their odious views and plan acts of violence. In corners of the internet, hate and ignorance combine for deadly affect. In his Prindle Post article, author Alex Layton examined the role that antisemitic political conspiracy played in the October 27, 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg, noting that the shooter “bought into [and was motivated by] a conspiracy that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was leading the caravan of refugees who have been migrating from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border in recent weeks.” These antisemitic political conspiracies are characterized by what’s known as “secondary antisemitism” where the roles of perpetrator and victimhood are reversed. Prindle Post author Amy Elyse Gordon analyzed how secondary antisemitism was used in the manifesto of the Tree of Life synagogue attacker, saying, “This . . . rhetoric of victimization, including his claims that Jews were committing genocide against ‘his people’ . . . moments before he shoots up a crowd of morning worshipers, is the idea that the real relationships of victimhood are being obscured. This statement reads like a pre-emptive self-absolution for a mass shooting as an act of self-defense.” Political conspiracies and secondary antisemitism certainly motivate attackers, but an underexamined area of influence on alt-right terrorists and their sympathizers may actually lie in the disparate texts reflecting debate and diversity within early Christian tradition.

The Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs notes that ideas of “traditional Christianity” have heavily influenced the rise of the American alt-right movement, but that “it is important to note that it is almost exclusively an aesthetic phenomenon and not a theological one. Actual Christian theology, in general, is quite hostile ground for the theories of scientific racism . . . and blood and soil ‘volkism’ favored by the alt-right to take root.” The claim of a primarily aesthetic connection between Christianity and the alt-right is to say that Christian symbolism is being exploited to create the appearance of Christendom within alt-right worldviews. For example, the Christian Identity movement—one of seventeen Christian hate groups listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center—is based on the postulate that only European whites are the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The movement, then, is built on an aesthetic of Judeo-Christian tradition despite the fact that its white supremacist reading of the bible is entirely unfounded. While alt-right terrorism certainly fabricates a Christian aesthetic, how deep are the theological roots of antisemitism on which they base their ideology?

Antisemitism is a complex, vile, and ever-evolving prejudice against the Jewish community. Antisemitism manifests itself in many ways, but one major example stems from the early Christian idea that the Jewish people were responsible for the murder of Jesus. Despite the fact that only Roman authorities had the power to condemn people to death, the canonical gospels depict the Jewish people as demanding the crucifixion Christ. The Gospel of Matthew, even portrays the Jewish crowds as verbally accepting the responsibility for the death of Christ: “When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ / All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children’” (Matthew 27:24-25). This passage was cited verbatim as justification for the attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue in the shooter’s open letter.

Professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, Annette Reed, says that the diabolization of the Jewish people was “just one of a broad continuum of different [rhetorical] strategies by which followers of Jesus made sense of their relation to Judaism.”

Christianity was not made legal in the Roman empire until 313 CE when emperor Constantine issued the edict of Milan—roughly three hundred years after the Crucifixion. Downplaying the role of Roman authorities in the death of Christ would have been advantageous for a religion attempting to gain political and cultural acceptance in Rome. At this time, the Christian tradition was also working through tensions of self-identification and began to define itself as separate from Judaism.

At the heart of the separation between early Jesus followers and Judaism lies an anxiety about Christianity’s responsibility for antisemitism. John Gager, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, writes, “The study of relations between Judaism and early Christianity, perhaps more than any other area of modern scholarship, has felt the impact of WWII and its aftermath. The experience of the Holocaust reintroduced with unprecedented urgency the question of Christianity’s responsibility for anti-Semitism: not simply whether individual Christians had added fuel to modern European anti-Semitism, but whether Christianity itself was, in its essence and from its beginnings, the primary source of anti-Semitism in Western culture.”

Embedded within the very identity of Christianity lies a troubling cause of antisemitism: the idea that Christians have replaced the Jewish people as the people of God. The Epistle to the Hebrews stands as one example of this idea—called supersessionism. The Jewish Annotated New Testament (second edition) says Christianity “understood itself as having replaced not just the covenant between Israel and God, but Judaism as a religion . . . Supersessionist theology inscribes Judaism as an obsolete, illegitimate religion, and in the New Testament this idea is articulated no more plainly than in Hebrews.” Hebrews argues for the superiority of Christ over Jewish tradition—one point in a complex navigation of Christian-Jewish relations by early Jesus followers. However, the Christian view of Judaism as an invalid religion coupled with a scapegoating of the Jewish people for the Crucifixion of Christ can and has been read to justify egregious acts of violence.

Instead of asking if antisemitism ‘exists’ in the earliest thoughts and writings of Christ-followers, it may be more helpful to ask if the New Testament motivates antisemitic thought—whether it’s ‘there’ or not. Professor Reed points out that glaring anti-Jewish messages in the New Testament existed within a context of “inner-Christian debate in which there were also others who were stressing instead the Jewishness of both Jesus and authentic forms of Christianity.” These anti-Jewish sentiments should then be understood within the context of the early Christian movement to separate itself from Judaism. Mark Leuchter, a Professor of religion and Judaism at Temple University, says, “Once the New Testament became holy specifically to Christians, the original context for debate was lost,” allowing the New Testament to become “justification for anti-Jewish violence and hatred . . . in ways that many Christians don’t even realize.”

The Chabad of Poway synagogue shooter was a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church—an evangelical denomination founded to counter liberalism in mainline Presbyterianism. After reading the Christian theology present in the shooter’s manifesto, Reverend of the church, Mika Edmondson, said, “We can’t pretend as though we didn’t have some responsibility for him — he was radicalized into white nationalism from within the very midst of our church.”

Also in response to reading the shooter’s manifesto, Reverend Duke Kwon of the Presbyterian Church in America says, “you actually hear a frighteningly clear articulation of the Christian theology in certain sentences and paragraphs. He has, in some ways, been well taught in the church.” To address the violent and growing crisis of alt-right, domestic terrorism in the United States, the Christian church must do more than simply condemn such acts. Christians, especially conservative, evangelical denominations whose political ideology engage alt-right views, should recognize that their teachings can and are being conflated with white nationalism. Practicing Christians are quick to defend the Bible in the face of criticism, but in this case there is more at stake than reputation. The connections between alt-right ideology and Christianity go dangerously beyond simple aesthetics. The reason Christian aesthetics are so widely co-opted by proponents of white supremacy is because early Christian scripture and the very identity of the Christian tradition has roots in anti-Jewish sentiment. Those who choose to ignore this reality become complacent in its tragic consequences.

March 17, 2016December 14, 2022

Chicago Protests and Social Movement Arrogance

“And these children that you spit on,
as they try to change their world”

The observation goes back at least to Bertrand Russell of an inverse correlation between how adamant a person is in their opinion and how much they know about the topic, but nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than when we come to questions of grassroots movement strategy. It seems every pundit this week – from the Daily Show to the New York Times to Fox News – has felt the need to weigh in on the protests that shut down Trump rallies in Chicago and elsewhere. And the consensus is that the protestors are SOOOOOO naïve. As Trevor Noah so respectfully put it: “It’s like trying to put out a fire by putting wood on it.” … “Ah yes, trust Bernie Sanders’s fans to have an unrealistic view of what is actually happening.”

Why this systemic condescension? In the NYT case, we are treated to a poll suggesting that many of those on the other side are really angry about the disruptions. In other cases, it is little more than a priori intuition, or some vague reference to the fact that Trump says he has enemies and now protestors are proving it.

But the question of how to effectively respond to a growing neo-fascist movement – one that has been building in this country for the last 30 years, involves a deeply disaffected and heavily armed population in control of many local governments and with a disproportionate representation among police and the military – is an empirical one. And in the case of most complicated empirical questions, it isn’t a bad idea to actually look at some research before launching into a lecture.

There are a number of routes to gaining knowledge of movement strategy, to a more informed judgment about the likely long-term effects of tactical decisions in a movement. You could read historical accounts of movements around the world and try to discern patterns. (One might start with books like Guns and Gandhi in Africa – ed. Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer; or Protest, Power, and Change ed. Roger Powers, et al.)

You could read the extensive social science literature on how movements develop and when and how they succeed. (See, for example Why Civil Resistance Works and other work by Erica Chenoweth, or Stellan Vinthagen’s A theory of nonviolent action: how civil resistance works, or a text like Social Movements, by Suzanne Staggenborg, just for starters.)

Or you could gain some skills “on the job” by actually participating in the work over a long period of time. (Or at least read some of the experiences of folks who have, for example the
marvelous collection We Have Not Been Moved, ed. Elizabeth “Bettita” Martinez et al.)

People who are most knowledgeable in all these ways tend to be epistemically humble – to realize that it is very hard to predict the long-term effects of various actions. But they do, at least, realize that there are many complex and often competing dynamics and come to recognize some of the issues that go far beyond the local and immediate reaction. For example, one point of many movements is to make structural violence explicit and obvious. In the Civil Rights Movement, the daily indignities, oppression, and thwarting of life by segregation inflicted all manner of violence on blacks. But this daily violence of the system was easy to ignore. When people sat down in segregated restaurants, or walked together over a bridge, however, preserving the Jim Crow order required the use of literal guns, fire-hoses, chains, beatings, and jail. And the violence of beating children was something that others could see and react to far more easily than daily indignities and “dreams deferred.” Critics then, as now, said that these confrontations precipitated violence. And in one sense, of course they did. That was the whole point. They brought out direct, person-to-person violence. But the violence was always there, just operating in the shadows, where oppression always grows best.

And by pulling violence out of the shadows – turning in-group organizing to deport Latinos, ban Muslims, reintroduce torture, bomb more civilians, demean and oppress women, etc. into an open direct confrontation – one forces the masses of apathetic or undecided Americans to confront the situation. Yes, many of the readers of this blog hear of nothing else, but the majority of Americans do not vote, and are woefully ignorant of what is going on either in towns like Ferguson or in Trump rallies and Klan meetings. The long-term effects on this population is far more important to the evaluation of a movement tactic than the short-term effect on someone already convinced of neo-fascist ideology.

Or consider the way that movements put issues and concepts into the public debate. Would everyone talk about “the 1%” without Occupy? Would anyone be debating “Black Lives Matter” without Black Lives Matter, Ferguson Frontline, and other militant protests?

But the main point is that if you haven’t made an attempt to educate yourself in any of these ways, you really should consider the possibility that you have no opinion worth listening to. Rather than jump on a soap-box and lecture people who have been studying and practicing movement politics their entire life, might I consider listening and learning instead? It may, in the end, be a bad idea to directly confront Trump’s neo-fascist rallies, but the pundits insisting on this haven’t a clue. They aren’t even so much as attending to the complex long-term dynamics of how right-wing movements grow in in various political contexts, of how left-movements are nurtured, developed, and given confidence, or the way that apathetic or ignorant people are pulled into the conflict.

Take a moment to hear from the organizers about their goals and strategic vision. Take a social movements course. Take a movement history course. Take a peace studies course. Take my course Nonviolence: Theory and Practice, or one of the hundreds of similar courses around the country. Go to a meeting of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Otherwise, seriously, just stop. The “children” “are immune to your consultations.” And that is a very good thing.