We seem to treat White Nationalists like their hate is normal. Like they’re the obnoxious kid we have to tolerate. Even after they’ve proven they’re more likely to be the sociopath threatening our community.
A few years ago I was concerned by a growth in cyber-bullying. And at the time, it seemed like there was more to it than that. Like there was something bigger lurking behind it.
Researching Gamergate, I found what seemed like a many-headed hydra of far-right politics playing fast-and-loose with legal forms of bullying and abuse.
I grew increasingly worried, not just by individuals espousing racist and gender-discriminatory rhetoric, but at the relative helplessness of our ability to stop it.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I wrote about it.
I wanted as many people as I knew to think past the headlines and wrestle with the perplexing nature of the problem: that there are no laws or enforcement mechanisms to stop it.
And worse, everyone seemed to be turning a blind eye, meaning even social pressure wouldn’t work.
At 7:00 am on April 27, 2015, my post went live.
By 7:10 am, my phone was lighting up with Twitter notifications. Nasty, disrespectful, and condescending all.
Retweets were attached to snide comments about my ignorance and stupidity.
I was really upset by the response, but wanted to take the high road.
So I replied to the first one, inviting him to explain. We tweeted back and forth for an hour. He offered counter examples of why the “mainstream media” was wrong and why it isn’t what I think.
To be honest, I was getting confused by it and ultimately adjusted the tone of my piece to appear “more balanced.” I suggested he read it.
Five minutes later he told me it was still total garbage.
I suggested that my concerns persisted and that I couldn’t do anything more.
We both recognized it was time to end the conversation, but it wasn’t a happy conclusion.
I felt conflicted
After this conversation was over, I felt really conflicted.
It seemed entirely possible (and I suggested to him as much) that there were two waves here. That the original Gamergaters were connected to the Pickup Artists and Men’s Rights Activists and other assorted sexists online. But the second wave was in it for the clarity and the community.
He tried to convince me it was never the former. Only ever the latter.
I’d like to say that tipped me off. But I was still convinced of my own two-waves hypothesis.
Yet the question lingered.
So I went back over the conversation—dozens of tweets over the hour. [Note: you can see my side of the conversation here. His account has since been suspended.] And it occurred to me not one of his tweets could be read as generous. Not a single one.
That’s when it started to sink in.
You know that feeling when a teacher tries to help you engage something, when they really want you to succeed, you trust them completely because they’re pulling for you? They’re on your side. It’s a kind of incredible generosity a teacher offers her student.
He didn’t sound like that in any one of these tweets. Not one. They all were a combination of hate and condescension.
I read through them twice to see if I were imagining things. I wasn’t.
What I had imagined was that this dude was for real. And I treated him like he was being honest with me.
Gaslighting for a Cause
I’d like to say I changed the blog post back right then. Just like I wish I could say I saw through him the whole time.
But I didn’t. I was played. I knew I had been played and yet it took many weeks for me to change it back. His lies were still swimming with the truth in my head.
Lies which kept incapacitating my ability to speak honestly.
And whether we all admit it or not, we’re being played.
There’s a darkness in our world which isn’t just emanating from the dark web.
There’s a straight line from Reddit and 4Chan to the rise of white nationalism today. A straight line emblazoned with vitriol and psy-ops. Like basement-dwelling secret agents, they want your frustration and ridicule.
They want you making fun of them. It isn’t their kryptonite, but their fuel. Your hate and condescension is their breeding ground.
Cheaters Gonna Cheat
These aren’t evil geniuses. They aren’t chess wizards. It isn’t so much that they are always thinking 12 moves ahead of you.
It’s more like they’ve set up the game of chess and started playing before you could realize this wasn’t a chat over coffee and scones.
They’ve tricked you into thinking this is something it’s not. And using your anxiety to gain the advantage.
To further belabor the analogy, they’ve set up the game, started playing, and convinced you that you’re a bad player because you’re losing.
But this also isn’t something we can “win”.
Mind Games
Paul Piff, an associate professor of social psychology at the University of California, Irvine has been running an experiment for over a decade. He gets two subjects to play a game of Monopoly, only he’s adjusted the rules slightly.
One subject plays the game normally. The other gets two turns each time, starts with twice as much money, and gets more money for passing “Go”.
Piff isn’t researching the results of each game. Because of course, the player with twice the turns and money wins. Every single time. That’s not a question at all.
He’s watching what happens to the players as they play.
How long does it take for the one with all the advantages to internalize their winning? How long before they start to think they’re better at the game than they’re opponent? And on the other side of the table, how long before the one playing by the standard rules will give up?
On average, the answer is just 3 turns.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the subjects are students in the researcher’s class and know what the effect is that he’s testing. They exhibit the same signs of dominance and self-importance from the winners. The game is rigged for them and they still think they won fairly.
We too often think we’re playing games as equals and attribute merit to our victories.
White Nationalism is a Long Con
As long as we treat the rise of white nationalists as a question of free speech, we are bound to lose. Because they’ve set up the game to benefit them regardless of what you do.
In fact, their very approach is a long con. And it’s one which will swindle the right into thinking they’re friends and the left into thinking they ought to treat them like they’re honest.
The Cheater Cheats MSU
Friends in my adopted hometown of East Lansing, Michigan recently protected their community from a white nationalist. But we don’t really know how to process all the information we’re given about this kind of event.
To many, it is all distilled down to a simple issue of free speech. His right to speak freely on a college campus. But it isn’t.
How it works is that an individual student forms a front group on campus to invite Richard Spencer to speak at an event. This gives Spencer a chance to come onto campus. That’s innocent enough. This would be like United Campus Ministries inviting me to speak at one of their Wednesday night table talks. The university doesn’t have anything to do with this. On the surface.
But Spencer wants everyone to think this is the same thing as the university inviting him to speak at something big, like commencement.
So he publicizes the event like it’s sponsored by Michigan State University. He poses as a public intellectual with some important research to share with the students of a school for higher learning. And of course, he promotes it in all the places white nationalists creep online.
Then he courts conflict.
And the media falls for it every time.
In truth, he has nothing to offer the academic world beyond a message of deception and hate; division and racist vitriol. He is an expert of nothing but hatred. And he’s preying on our willingness to give nearly anyone the opportunity to share in “the marketplace of ideas”.
A marketplace he’s prepared to manipulate.
And every time, we fall for it.
Protecting the Community
The community comes out to protect itself. People from East Lansing and all over Ingham County, students and alumni, supporters and leaders came out to protect the community from this hate. Some in protest and others in counter-programming. And many others in trying to stop the invitation at the source.
It seems hard for many to square this impulse to protect. They want to protect everyone’s free speech. But the only speech Spencer wants protected is his own.
Many sought to counter-program; to distract from the game. They didn’t want to play Spencer’s game, so they opted out. The thinking goes: if you don’t give the fire any oxygen, it will go out.
What the wider public can’t grasp is that neither tactic: confronting or ignoring: works. If completely silencing white nationalism is the point, that is. Throughout history, racist ideologies grew when we engage with them and when we ignore them (as this episode of On the Media spells out).
So the truth is, the devil is playing a game and you can’t opt out of it.
Those who choose to not get involved functionally choose to support the rise of white nationalism and support the ideology of white nationalists just as much as the protestors they criticize. White nationalists grow either way.
Therefore, when we focus on what is the “best” response, we’re missing the point. And letting white nationalists blame all of us for their growth simply absolves extremists of their responsibility.
The One Thing White Nationalists Get Right
The problem with racists and white nationalists like Richard Spencer is that his one brilliant discovery is how to rig the game to win however he plays it. So playing along with this game rewards the deception.
So if we take the “ignore him” route, then he gains significant ground in the fictional marketplace of ideas because he is stealing a seat at the table and we just let him have it.
He uses this to gain legitimacy and spread his toxic message into new communities. It helps bring other fascists, racists, and Nazi fetishists out of the woodwork and emboldens them.
And if we take another route and try to deal with him, he will get us to confront his ideas after stealing legitimacy. He cheated to get there and is manipulating the conversation. Not to speak his mind because he values free speech, but because we value free speech and will honor his right to speak. An honor he isn’t reciprocating.
In other words, we get drawn into an argument with moving goal posts and designed for us to lose no matter what.
The third route is to confront him and try to prevent his opportunities to speak. Something Spencer apologists eagerly spin into the left/right sorting matrix. This emboldens the right and divides the left.
All three routes lead to people giving white nationalists the microphone to spread hate and division. And in the end, all three lead to more white nationalists.
They’ve rigged the game and we’re all being played.
Selling Off Free Speech
Since we can’t make the game go away by opting out or playing along, what can we do?
The only way to change the game is to first recognize what it is Spencer and other white nationalists are actually doing. We have to do the hard work of actually seeing what they’re doing to free speech and social norms in our country.
This isn’t some hypothetical case about the abstract limits of free speech. These are intellectual terrorists. They will gleefully take your free speech and hock it on the black market.
Stop pretending like they’re being intellectually honest!
Stop pretending that they’ll stick to the terms of debate!
They’ve got you cornered and would happily strip you of your speech rights and your dignity. They use abuse and bullying tactics to gaslight and confuse us.
It’s not that they want to win. They want to break us. All of us.
The greatest enemy of an open and inclusive society is the one advocating exclusion. The one who will bring the whole system down for his benefit. And they know how to get us to protect their right to do just that.
So the first actions are internal.
First recognize the problem is with white nationalists.
- Recognize that we’ve been tricked.
- Acknowledge that Richard Spencer and other white nationalists are offering a game we don’t need to play.
- Recognize that we didn’t agree to sit down and play a game with them.
- Acknowledge that the game is rigged to ensure that we lose.
- Recognize there is no marketplace of ideas and all markets are weak against manipulation.
- Stand up to the hate directly.
- Don’t get sucked into the hypotheticals or process debates — they are used to manipulate us.
- Focus on their purpose, which is to weaken our democratic institutions and replace our moral values with theirs.
- Recognize how many people in our communities are standing up to these attacks on our character and are willing to protect us.
- Acknowledge that our diversity in responses ensures white nationalists have to spend their time defending themselves rather than attack our communities.
Then communicate a different approach.
- Help our friends and families see that arguing over free speech is a red herring. They want us thinking about free speech because that’s the game and it distracts us from seeing the ways in which the game is rigged.
- Bring conversations about free speech around to their actual place in our culture. Absolutist positions on free speech are extremist. Even when they are routinely reflected in the media.
- Offer genuine alternatives to hate. Not to deprive their speech of oxygen, but as a form of rejecting racism and promoting inclusion.
- Encourage universities and colleges, the media, and political parties to see how they’re being manipulated. Their ignorance to white nationalist aims prevents them from seeing how they’re being played. They need only read their history.
- Offer your counter witness of love and inclusion.
- Lift up the people in our communities who are defending the community — from student activists to homeless coalitions.
- Read the news critically and thoughtfully.
- Use the platforms we have to encourage the kind of culture in which truly free speech can be nourished.
- Refuse to see conflict as the enemy. Manipulation and bullying is.
- Don’t pretend white nationalism is an equal participant on a neutral playing field. It’s a cheater trying to break the game.
We must reveal white nationalists and supremacists for what they are.
In other words, just use what you have to better see the situation, assess what we’re up against, and stand up for the health and vitality of our communities on all fronts. Marching, counter-programming, proactive planning with universities all send the community’s message of tolerance to the front in the midst of dishonest events.
But not every town is hosting Richard Spencer. And yet we have white nationalists gathering online and apologists defending them in our coffee shops. And their defense is built to exploit our eagerness to defend speech. Given the circumstances, then taking a moral stand with our neighbors or lifting up good actors in our communities doesn’t seem like much.
But it is.
Because this isn’t systemic racism and injustice — this is a morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest “debate” exploiting the public’s love of the free exchange of ideas. It’s a cancer in the public dialogue which will endanger our systems of government. But it only lives as an intellectual idea.
So we treat it as what it actually is: a lie. A falsehood masquerading as truth. A dishonest concept given power by our communal silence and honest respect for the dignity of all of our neighbors.
This leaves us with only one “do”. We stop pretending it’s honest. And stop pretending white nationalists offer a genuine debate.
White nationalism thrives in secrecy and grows by deception. It is the house cat using its shadow to convince people it’s a lion. And as long as we lock ourselves away in fear or treat its lies for honest debate, we’ll miss the truth.
White nationalism breeds in lies.
And exposure to the truth is white nationalism’s kryptonite.