A Common Goal for Right Wing Recallers, Reopeners, Refusers, Rejectors & Erasers
To be perfectly clear, I’m referring to Newsom Recallers, School Reopeners (reincarnated as anti-maskers), Vaccine Refusers, Climate Change Rejectors and History Erasers.
There can be legitimate questions asked by concerned humans on all of the above topics; the disruptive manifestations of those issues in the news, however, are inauthentically organized campaigns.
Are all the people waving Trump flags or confronting retail employees over masks willing participants in a grand conspiracy? Absolutely not.
Are they all being manipulated by modular campaigns designed to stoke outrage? Yes they are. Strong emotional states are a precursor to get people to ignore facts and rational analysis.
Here’s the thing: while there may not be 100% overlap in human terms, the end goal for all these groups is the same, namely wearing away the respect for societal institutions useful in upholding the rule of law.
It just so happens this sort of outrage is good for business and bad for democracy.
https://twitter.com/TimothyNoah1/status/1419679311095898118?s=20
Monetization of outrage has become a business strategy for the right wing press, as social media platforms reward aggregation that manipulates content for conservative political causes. Meanwhile, the standard right wing approach to the media generally is to portray themselves as victims.
Bad actors on social media platforms from a wide variety of countries who see their interests as being in conflict with the U.S. (and democracy in general) are eager to use their networks to promote all these causes, no matter how disconnected from reality they may be.
Researchers at the University of Southern California focused on Twitter (similar conclusions have been reached about other platforms), examining around 240 million messages related to the 2020 election, and discovering thousands of bot accounts, the majority of which were promoting right-leaning conspiracies, such as QAnon.
In 2016, the Russians (and to a lesser degree the Iranians) paid people to create these messages. In the past election, they didn’t need to-- the conspiracy networks arising out of the past decade were doing it for them.
Via the Horizons Tracker:
The analysis found that bots would almost exclusively retweet content originally shared by human users. Human users would often retweet these retweets though, especially when they shared their political leaning, which helped to propagate the original content.
The team identified clear differences in the type of content shared by bots and humans. Interestingly, however, right-leaning bots appeared to outweigh left-leaning bots by about 4-to-1. The analysis also found that right-leaning users were also 12 times more likely to share conspiracy theories than their left-leaning peers.
A recent and especially egregious incident at the Cedars-Sinai Breast Health Services building is worth retelling.
A sidewalk protest premised on objections to the health group’s mandatory masking policy included dozens of anti-maskers holding signs with anti-vaxx and QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories.
Doctors trying to go to work were surrounded and harassed. A cancer patient was assaulted and sprayed with bear repellant.
Via Vice.com:
Tensions continued to rise as more far-right, anti-maskers arrived on the scene. A small group of anti-fascists also arrived, and got into altercations with the far-right. A woman holding a megaphone shoved Burns, and then punched her several times. Burns said, on social media, that the woman hit her in the chest and struck her scars.
Thursday was the second time that anti-maskers had targeted that particular breast cancer clinic over its mask policy. The ugly scenes and casual political violence that unfolded there on both occasions have become troublingly common across the U.S.
California in particular has emerged as a hotspot for that type of activity. Just last weekend, Proud Boy associates joined far-right conspiracy theorists outside Wi Spa in LA’s Korea Town, as part of an ongoing protest against the spa’s nondiscrimination policy of accommodating the needs of transgender guests. Reporters at the scene of the spa were assaulted, dozens were arrested, and police later located weapons scattered across the site including knives, pepper spray and stun guns. A protest at the same location earlier this month resulted in two stabbings.
You don’t have to look very hard to find some very hinky stuff going on. Journalist Brooke Binkowski has been on this beat for years, including stints with Snopes.com and now Truth or Fiction.com.
She points signage behind speakers at a recent “Save Our Students” rally tying all the current inauthentic protests together. At the anti-mask campaign referred to above, Recall Newsom flags were part of the protest gear. The same can be said for the causes supported by the recent El Cajon rally featuring trump's Svcretary of State Mike Pompeo.
A Washington Post article from the early days of the anti-mask/reopen campaigns observed the far right donors working through various organizations to foster protests at a time when thousands of people were dying daily from the coronavirus.
A network of right-leaning individuals and groups, aided by nimble online outfits, has helped incubate the fervor erupting in state capitals across the country. The activism is often organic and the frustration deeply felt, but it is also being amplified, and in some cases coordinated, by longtime conservative activists, whose robust operations were initially set up with help from Republican megadonors.
The Convention of States project launched in 2015 with a high-dollar donation from the family foundation of Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican patron. It boasts past support from two members of the Trump administration — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development.
It also trumpets a prior endorsement from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a close Trump ally who is pursuing an aggressive plan to reopen his state’s economy. A spokesman for Carson declined to comment. Cuccinelli and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.
The initiative, aimed at curtailing federal power, is now leveraging its sweeping national network and digital arsenal to help stitch together scattered demonstrations across the country, making opposition to stay-at-home orders appear more widespread than is suggested by polling.
Go a little further into the article and familiar names connected to the coronavirus denial movement keep popping up, among them: the Koch family, the Heritage Foundation, Betsy Devos family, FreedomWorks, and Women for Trump (a leader of which was the holder of the permit for the Washington DC January 6th rally).
Lest you think I’m saying this is all a vast unifying conspiracy theory of the planet, I’m not. Each of these various groups/families has their own agenda and --more importantly-- a desire to win the big grifter jackpot.
What they have in common is that an end goal of their agendas include destruction of democracy to be replaced with an endless cycle of greed and authoritarianism. The Kochs want to preserve their carbon extraction, the Heritage folks want to preserve an economy allowing for maximum exploitation (or, as they like to call it, freedom)...etc.etc.
Here’s no small amount of irony in the fact that organizing strategies originally developed with the end goal of enriching democracy are now being used to weaken it. Lessons learned by activists in the 20th century were packaged into modules that could be taken off the shelf for any cause.
(You could even say this was the Taylorization of protest, funded in large part by the philanthropic entities drawing on the wealth of the economy benefiting from the policies being protested.)
Modular organizing of political campaigns is now the process used by organizations of all stripes to channel citizen participation in the process of change. It’s not inherently bad or good any more than a cell phone is.
Via Binkowski’s Anatomy of an Inauthentically Organized Campaign
But that common and relatively harmless practice is easily weaponized by disinformation campaigns. When modular activism meets existing right-wing disinformation networks, it becomes inauthentic by definition; bad faith political entities are now tapping in to the resentment and rage that they have deliberately incited and provoked in entire groups of like-minded conspiracy theorists in order to get them to show up at protests to make scenes. The topics and ideas behind them do not matter. What matters is the outrage...
...It is easy to spot authentic versus inauthentic protests. Authentically organized protests, where the people showing up actually care about the topic they are demonstrating for or against as opposed to simply trying to upset people they disagree with politically, stay on message and while they can be emotional, they lack the quality of inarticulate, braying rage that is all too familiar to anyone who has covered an inauthentically organized event…
...The harm in this, of course, is that it is forcing disinformation into policy that deliberately elides the actual will of the people — a profoundly anti-democratic campaign. In other words, this is not a sign of emotions running high or an increasingly polarized country. It is a relatively small group of activists who explicitly intend to push policies into reality that are deeply unpopular in at best and actively harmful at worst. They are intentionally being pushed by and for the far right in order to get white supremacists, anti-vaccine activists, and other conspiracy theorists into power at all levels — so that they can enact whatever agenda against Americans they like.
The basis for recruiting new converts at this point are the fears stoked by Right-wing pundits and conservative media about the Biden administration. As these fears get amplified, the justification for escalating tactics is easier for them to make.
Craig John’s analysis at Jacobin seems to me to be an appropriate place to end today’s observations:
The far right intentionally pushes the envelope of the politically acceptable, organizes at the grassroots, and works both with and against conservatives in the struggle for power. Once conservatives learn that they can use the far right to threaten and even kill their opponents, and as the far right plays that role increasingly openly, the rules of politics change. From brawls at Trump rallies to Charlottesville and the Capitol riot, the emerging alliance between conservatives and the far right is showing itself to be intentionally and strategically politically violent.
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