goldy, faith
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">salon:</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">As mentioned in our first installment, this is all part of a broader pattern of overlap between the far-right, including the white nationalist right, with right-wing Catholicism.</span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><b> In 2017, groyper leader Milo Yiannapoulos was drummed out of many right-wing movements </b>for statements he made minimizing child sex abuse, and subsequently used his return to Catholicism as an opportunity to rebrand. </span></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This March he headlined an anti-abortion convention in Ohio that was blessed by the local Catholic bishop</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, and in June he will be a featured speaker at a Church Militant Resistance bootcamp</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Canadian white nationalist<b> Faith Goldy, who was disgraced after appearing on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer,</b> likewise touted her return to the church as part of her rehabilitation. "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> found his way to a new audience at the end of 2020 with a highly public conversion to Catholicism, as did "Kent State gun girl" Kaitlin Bennett in late 2021.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">They joined a core group of far-right activists who have deployed their Catholic identity in service of their movements, including Pizzagate provocateur-turned conservative commentator Jack Posobiec,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fuentes himself. </span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As the alt-right was planning its 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most popular places where activists did their planning was a Discord chat forum called the "Nick Fuentes forum," dedicated to exploring connections between "Unite the Right" and the Catholic Church</span>. Within it, hundreds of posters discussed traditionalist Catholicism and posted memes alternating, or combining, Crusades-era imagery with neo-Nazi and antisemitic content. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As journalist Eric Martin reported at the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners, some posters identified themselves as "<b>Charles Coughlin Roman Catholics," for the 1930s pro-fascist priest</b> and broadcaster who helped pioneer the demagogic media style that is fracturing our democracy today. Fuentes himself has waxed nostalgic about fascist and monarchist regimes in Europe and Latin America that were grounded in Catholic teaching, and in 2018 declared on a livestream that, "in an ideal world," there would be "a global Catholic theocracy" and that "the state should enforce morality that is informed by Catholic teaching." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">More broadly online, far-right activists online began adopting phrases like <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">"Viva Cristo Rey" (Christ the King) or "Deus Vult" (God wills it) in their posts and tweets, and Catholic symbolism like medieval crosses and Crusader imagery. </span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some conservative Catholics have welcomed this development. In a 2019 article published by the Catholic right magazine Crisis, "Kids in defense of the culture," <b>American Greatness editor Pedro Gonzalez praised Fuentes' groypers. "</b>They have chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world," Gonzalez wrote. "In an age of compromise and petty principles, groypers have chosen to stand for something, armed with little more than digital slingshots. That alone is reason enough to hear them out."</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some conservative Catholics have embraced the groypers, arguing that they "have chosen to be guided by a Christianity hammered free of the dross of the modern world."</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>But moderate and liberal Catholics were appalled. </b>"It's such a horrifying appropriation of Catholicism," noted writer and researcher D.W. Lafferty in a 2020 podcast episode produced by Where Peter Is, a moderate Catholic website that tracks the Catholic right. Lafferty described the new far-right aesthetic as<b> "Pepe Catholicism,</b>" while Georgetown University theologian Adam Rasmussen called it "<b>Catholic LARPing"</b>: a way for the alt-right to pretend they were "Knights Templar fighting the forces of darkness in the deep state."</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb, author of the papal biography "The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church," explained during the 2020 presidential campaign, the far right's adoption of Catholic symbolism was a means for the movement to infuse itself with deeper spiritual meaning. "The populists and nationalists were looking for some kind of soul for their politics. And they found it in some symbols of the faith," Lamb said. "And they're powerful symbols. Quite often they make the whole case that the past has been lost." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"In a sense, you empty the content of the religious," Lamb noted earlier this year, "and use the externals — the rosary beads, the crucifix, some words, perhaps some prayers — but you use it as an identity marker to give your movement a sense that it has a soul or deeper intensity at a moral level." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But that influence goes both ways, and as Lamb noted in 2020, as more and more right-wing Catholics identified themselves with Trump's re-election campaign, "Trumpism," in turn, "got into the church." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As Lafferty said at the time, "What's happening on the right, I think, is unprecedented," except for the historical examples of ultranationalist fascist groups before World War II, such as Action Française in France or the Falangist movement in Spain. <b>"But fascism isn't new and the Catholic Church was often complicit in fascism," he added. "So it's not totally shocking that people can come in and do this." </b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The revelation that some highly enthusiastic and visible elements of the Catholic right are now partnering with a group whose reputation is based on snarky displays of over-the-top bigotry just marks an escalation of that trend. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">"This is a continuation of a pattern that's been happening for years," said Lafferty, "and it's only going to become more intense now that we're looking at the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned." As a faithful Catholic, he agrees with the Church's stance against abortion, he said, but he also sees the imminent SCOTUS reversal as one more "pillar of what we call 'normal' falling." </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aha note escalator, and rexycling mutation/hybridization of older conspir BS</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">he's the next soros re covid?</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Bill Gates</b><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> </span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">coronavirus conspiracy theory</span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> </span><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=19c9d0c412f164bbdf5e5cd69129e07f5b521ac77e38597f5c7edfd7fd10d1543bfa51dda611de811ac6497f73f512982f4bbdeac5b1423c" title="spread on social media" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">spread on social media</a><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> </span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">and then to a Fox News host.</span></font></p><p><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></p><p><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news">https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news</a></font></span></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma many link, pix, graf/ twt</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PUBLISHED 04/08/20 12:13 PM EDT</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A conspiracy theory about Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms, getting high engagement numbers, and has since been pushed by both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a Newsmax correspondent.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years, has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday and The Daily Show about the need for a vaccine.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Gates on March 18 also participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”</span><b> Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated.</b> A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort (the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of Gates’ past remarks).</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction around March 17, when a <b>YouTube video</b> about the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” </span>and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in Facebook groups and showed up as a meme on Instagram.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Infowars Bill Gates</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” and the conspiracy subreddit on Reddit, where a user called Gates’ Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> <b style="">white nationalist Faith Goldy</b> wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Faith Goldy Bill Gates</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan, it was picked up by NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as YourNewsWire,</b> which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated on social media and as a meme, along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Gates Instagram3</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On March 21, another YouTube video was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.</span>” The <b>video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements</b>, according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo<b>. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Gates Facebook1</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” and claiming he is the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; </span>they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The <b>videos included a clip from anti-Semitic conspiracy theory outlet TruNews</b> and a video whose title called the virus a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements combined).</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Gates YouTube5</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views </b>(despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy). One video that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” and accused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Video file</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CitationFrom a video uploaded to TikTok on April 1, 2020</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.”</span> Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Gates Facebook Instagram meme</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By April 6, bigger QAnon accounts on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler, who accused Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.” </font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That afternoon, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted a thread accusing Gates of “control[ling] global health policy” and saying that his “plan” was to use “vaccines to track people.”</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">On the morning of April 7, Fox host Laura Ingraham, while quote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's post about Gates’ AMA, said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have circulated on social media, including others about Gates and the virus.</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Here’s how techno-utopianism decayed into alt-right madness</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon October 9, 2019</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz put his sanity on the line in order to take a deep dive into two parallel worlds: the reactionary universe of the alt-right, and the technological triumphalist paradigm of Silicon Valley. The latter is responsible for selling us a utopian vision of the internet that would (supposedly) bind humanity, yet which instead has stoked political division and created, indirectly, the alt-right. In “<b>Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” Marantz offers readers an explanation as to how social networks created by idealist techies were co-opted by a rat’s nest of bigots, trolls, and fascists, who exploited the supposed “neutrality” of platforms to spread hate.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Marantz spoke to Salon about his new book and how the internet is changing democracy. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This is a book about how the advent of social media really opened up the social and political discourse in this country to the people that Hillary Clinton aptly deemed a “basket full of deplorables.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I think the deplorable part was more apt than the basket part. But, yeah.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">How much do you think tech matters in the rise of not just the alt-right, but Donald Trump?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Tech matters hugely for the rise of Trumpism and for nationalist populism around the world. That’s not to say that it’s the only source of energy for those movements, and it’s also not to say that there aren’t huge benefits to opening up discourse in all kinds of ways.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I don’t want to paint a monochromatic picture or say that tech has only led to deleterious outcomes or antisocial outcomes, but I think for too long there was this tacit assumption among tech bros, and also just among the general public, that on the whole the internet would make the world more open and connected and set us all free and make it more fair and tolerant and generally be pro-social. And I think we’ve seen pretty definitively that that hasn’t entirely been the case.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What I like about your book is you really do talk about some of the historical antecedents to the rise of social media. This is something that I’ve been boring my friends with, pointing out, you know, it’s not like the printing press didn’t lead to violence, too.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Exactly, right. In fact, it led to many of the same kinds of violence, antisemitism, bigotry, and misinformation. None of this is new. It’s just that we’ve kind of forgotten those lessons of history.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As you said, the tech industry was very idealistic, promoting the idea that social media would connect people, would help spread good ideas. The Arab Spring was a big marketing event for social media, even as it was a real thing in the real world. Why do you think there was an unwillingness to look at the possibility that it would also give rise to hate speech, violence, bigotry, things like that?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Part of it is just that it’s uncomfortable and unpleasant to think about bigotry and hate speech. So people would rather not do it.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I’ve faced that even while reporting this book. I like to think that the book is engaging and even darkly funny. But I’ve had people indicate that they are scared to read it, because they would just rather not think about this stuff.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I think that the only way out is through, which is why I used James Baldwin as an epigraph. Nothing can be changed until it’s faced.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I happen to think this stuff isn’t as depressing as people worry it’ll be, but that’s a separate topic. But yeah, it’s not fun to think about.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Also, we tend to get stuck on this dichotomy of optimism versus pessimism, and I think that’s just the wrong way of thinking about these things. A more useful frame than either optimism or pessimism is what I refer to as contingency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tell me more about that.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I borrowed that concept from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who wrote one of my favorite books called “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” And contingency, boiling it down a lot, just means we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can’t have a teleological view of the future. We can’t assume that things are pre-ordained to happen in a certain way. We have to look at the facts as they are and make an informed judgment about whether we’re going to inevitably have a more perfect union and inevitably make progress.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Often we just assume that those things will just happen inevitably. A more contingent view of history would suggest that they don’t happen automatically, and they don’t happen at all if you don’t work for them to happen.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In this book, you often explore your own emotions about <b>institutions versus the “disruption” of the tech industry, </b>and express some longing I think for some of the <b>gatekeeping power that old institutions had before the time of social media.</b> Having gone through the entire process of writing and publishing and now marketing this book, where do you fall on that scale right now?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I see it as a trade-off. By no means do I want to pretend that the whole gatekeeper model was perfect or even very good. It was flawed in all kinds of ways. It was run by upper middle-class white men who didn’t have a very nuanced view of the country for the most part. There were all kinds of problems with corporate control. Nothing about our past should be construed as a golden age.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s just that when you tear down all those structures, and don’t even try to even pretend to think about what’s going to replace them, or you replace them with something worse, then the problems don’t get better. They get worse.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Before even there was a term, the alt-right, feminists and social justice activists were observing that social media was allowing uglier forms of bigotry to flourish. A lot of the blame was kind of put on the white maleness of the tech industry, that there was a blindness of the people running it. How much do you give credence to that?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I definitely give credence to it. I think the basic critique that you can’t really readily empathize with people if you don’t have representation of all people within your company, I think is an apt critique.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But I don’t think that it would solve everything if the tech companies had diversity and inclusion statistics that accurately reflected the country. I think that would help, but I think the problems are deeper and more systemic than that.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The discourse around this particular problem has often been one of ignorance, right? There’s a sense that a lot of the white male leaders of the tech industry have progressive values.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Some of them.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On the other hand, you ran into <b>Peter Thiel, at the DeploraBall. </b>Do you think that’s an element of the problem right now? That we just have bad actors in tech leadership?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Well, my critique of Peter Thiel in the book was not based on his support for Trump, although I find his support for Trump extremely regrettable. My critique of him was based on the fact that I tried to engage him in a dialogue about the fundamental problems at Facebook, which arguably could not have become as successful as it is without his early investment. And instead of answering my critiques, he just left and didn’t respond to me at all. And didn’t respond to followup questions during the fact checking process.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So my critique of him is really more substantive. I mean there are lots of Trump supporters in the country, Peter Thiel being one of them. I can debate with them or decry their views, but really my issues with Thiel are that he got rich off of Facebook. I’m just curious whether he knew that there would be all these negative impacts on our society, in addition to the positive ones. And if he did know, why he didn’t do more to stop it?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Shifting over to the systematic issue, in this book you analyzed the concept of<b> virality, which you frame in a Darwinian sense</b>. Could you explain that more for some of the readers of Salon?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There’s this concept of the old gatekeeper outlets, specifically the New York Times, that they give you all the news that’s “fit to print”. It struck me that that word, “fit”, has the unintended double meaning. They mean “fit” as in what’s appropriate.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But social media algorithms, for the most part, are not concerned with what’s appropriate. They’re concerned with what gets engagement. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Engagement can be anything. It can be positive engagement like likes, and it can also be negative engagement like hate reads or shares for the reason of saying, take a look at this asshole. Algorithms are neutral with regards to that. <b>Their job is to keep you hooked and keep your brainstem fired up so that you stay on the platform.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That’s what leads to this Darwinian outcome. A Darwinian system, like nature, doesn’t care whether you’re a surviving by being nice or surviving by being red in tooth and claw, as they say. All that matters is whether you pass on your genes.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The same is true in the world of memes, which is a term coined by a very prominent Darwinian biologist to explain how ideas struggle for dominance. These systems create a world in which the way that ideas struggle for dominance is pretty red in tooth and claw.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On Twitter, if you write a “look at this asshole”, you get yelled at by people saying don’t give trolls attention, that it just raises their profile. The counter argument to that is, if we don’t look at it, we can’t criticize it.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> How do you kind of feel about the debate? Is there anything that we, as individuals, can do to change the incentive structures of the internet?</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To take the first part first, there’s no good answer to the question of how to respond to noxious trolls, because if you give them attention, even negative attention, then you’re feeding them oxygen. If you ignore them, then you are risking seeming complicit. So that’s why that’s such a vexing problem because there really is no good individual answer to it.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Systemically, there are ways to tweak the systems to diminish that kind of stuff, but as a person, I don’t really see an easy way out.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I think the flippant answer that a lot of people land on is to just say, I’m just going to log off, which is really good for your mental health. And I recommend it for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. But you don’t get to log off of the country, right? So these systems can still be affecting who your president is, and whether you get to live in a country that has environmental regulations and all the rest of it. So you can’t opt out of that.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So let’s talk about some of those <b>trolls</b>, because they are admittedly fun to talk about. You spend a lot of time in this book engaging them as personalities. You went to the DeploraBall. The right wing trolls, they really think of themselves as rebels. It’s both their identity and their justification. But I couldn’t help but think that their ideologies are just old-fashioned racism and sexism, their behavior is like out of a bad beer commercial and their jokes reminded me of the lame jokes from some high school locker room. How on earth are they holding themselves out as rebels?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yeah, they’re really bad at it. Yet it’s still really effective. It reminds me of the kind of comedian who is not a good comedian but just gets laughs anyway because he or she — let’s be real, it’s usually a he — will just say whatever makes the audience uncomfortable and get those kind of uncomfortable laughs from the crowd. It’s just cheap.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A lot of this rebel attitude is so central to a lot of these people that </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The Rebel</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">” is a name of one of their big media companies. This woman, </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Faith Goldy, </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">got fired from The Rebel. The line she crossed was going on a Nazi podcast during the march in Charlottesville. When she got fired for that, there were commenters online who were saying to the owners of that media company, “You guys should change your names from The Rebel Media to The Conformist Media.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And it’s like, so being a Nazi is being a rebel? That’s just a really, really shitty and unoriginal way to be rebellious, in addition to being terrifying and disgusting and all the rest of it.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When I think of the Nazis, I don’t think of people that were really into rebellion as a concept.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">[Scoffs] Yeah, free spirits.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the interesting paradoxes of the entire alt-right is they often get called contrarian, provocateurs, transgressive, but the values they stand up for don’t remind me of transgression at all. They just remind me of the same old sexism and racism that was socially normative when I was growing up.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Well, they’re <b>transgressive i</b>n the sense that they’re saying things that you’re not supposed to say in polite company. That doesn’t make it interesting or cool or original. It does make it transgressive in the sense that you can offend people. You can freak them out. And then, if you created a set of norms within your own little subculture that declares that anybody who ever gets offended or freaked out is therefore triggered and whatever, then okay. By the terms of that self-sustaining logic, you can quote unquote “win”, because you triggered people. But ultimately, you’re not serving any very interesting end other than having a moment of infamy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">There’s a lot of hiding behind the term “free speech”, which is treated as a kind of empty set value, because nobody’s really taking anyone’s free speech away. Why do you think that there’s so much emphasis on topics like free speech and supposed transgression, and very little about the actual content of this “free speech”?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This is part of why I thought it was so important to actually spend hours and months and years of my life hanging out with these people. It wasn’t because I enjoyed it, or because I preferred to get dinner with Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec rather than hanging out with my wife and child. It was because the real way to understand how these people think and talk and interact with each other is just to hang around them for long enough that they forget you’re there.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The free speech thing is one example of that. They can talk about this stuff in the abstract and use language that sounds really principled, but when you hang around for long enough it becomes clear that it’s just a tool they’re using. Like anything else, it’s a weapon.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">If they can use “free speech” as a talking point to advance their agenda, they’ll use that. If they can use something else, they’ll use something else.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At no point did I want to be so contrary to the contrarians that I became anti-free speech. It’s just that when you see what’s really motivating them, you can see through their game. But that only happens when you put in the time.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Having spent as much time as you did with them, do you have any advice for readers on self care and mental health management when faced with this vile stuff?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I do think it’s appropriate a lot of times to step away from it and log off. Being a keyboard warrior 24 hours a day is not healthy for anyone. But I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where social media were only inhabited by nihilists and trolls and bigots. So I don’t want all good people in the world to permanently abandon all internet spaces. But I do think it’s worth just stepping back and thinking in a slightly broader way about what is all this and what are we trying to accomplish?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The larger frame of the book is about the hijacking of a national conversation. </b>On any given day, you can sit out all of the trending topics and not weigh in and not even know they’re happening and you will be totally fine. The world will go on without you and you won’t really miss anything.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a larger, more sustained sense, I do think that part of the job of being a fully engaged citizen of a putative democracy is to have a stake in the national conversation. If part of that or a lot of that is happening online, then so be it. But I think it’s just worth doing with as much of a clear head and a sense of purpose as possible.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself,” is out now. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://thinkprogress.org/cpac-tries-to-circle-the-wagons-against-the-far-right-60408d44e7df/">https://thinkprogress.org/cpac-tries-to-circle-the-wagons-against-the-far-right-60408d44e7df/</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></font></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></font></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /></font></font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>CPAC tries to circle the wagons against the far-right</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><b>
</b></div><div>Far-right grifters were kept at arm's length, but a few still managed to sneak in.</div><div>LUKE BARNES</div><div>MAR 2, 2019, 11:13 AM</div><div>
</div><div>NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — In 2019, CPAC seems to have gone out of its way to put on a drab, non-controversial conservative show.</div><div>
</div><div>There was none of the drama of 2017, when far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos was disinvited just days before the event after a video of him condoning pedophilia emerged, and when neo-Nazi Richard Spencer roamed the CPAC halls rubbing shoulders with younger attendees.</div><div>
</div><div>This year, by contrast, a collection of white nationalists, far-right grifters and conspiracy theorists were kept at an arms’ length and mostly had to be content with roaming the Gaylord Hotel outside of the convention. Many were initially denied passes, but managed to wangle their way inside, although they had to be content themselves with posting about CPAC on Twitter, rather than having direct contact with attendees.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Among those spotted was Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist podcaster who lurked around the edges of CPAC like a vulture. Faith Goldy, a white nationalist who ran for mayor of Toronto in 2018 — getting 3.4 percent of the vote — was also present. Patrick Casey, the executive director of the far-right group Identity Evropa, tried to get into CPAC before being informed that his pass had been canceled. Casey then promptly launched into an angry tweetstorm about how CPAC wasn’t a forum for real conservatives anyway.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Certainly the most amusing example of the far-right and its associated grifters attempting to get some form of CPAC cred occurred on Thursday afternoon, when noted pro-Trump trolls Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl — both of whom were also denied their in their initial attempts to get into CPAC — held a “press conference” along with conservative lobbyist Jack Burkman to outline another set of spurious, unsubstantiated allegations, this time against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)</span>.</div><div>
</div><div>The event rapidly devolved into farce, with Wohl talking over Loomer every time she tried to speak about her supposed “censoring” on social media, and journalists asking why a document marked “Strictly Private and Confidential” was being distributed to the public.</div><div>
</div><div>Wohl and Goldy were later spotted chatting to each other at CPAC, but wearing attendee and not media badges. It is not immediately clear why Wohl especially was allowed in, after being so pointedly denied entry earlier in the day.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Later that night Wohl made an appearance at an afterparty hosted by Turning Points USA,</b> the conservative student group, which featured Donald Trump, Jr. and TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk. Among the (mostly college-aged) revelers was Enrique Tarrio, current leader of the far-right Proud Boys gang was also spotted roaming the halls.</div><div>
</div><div>On Friday, two members of the Proud Boys in New York City pled guilty to charges stemming from a fight outside the New York Metropolitan Republican club in 2018, where the Proud Boys viciously attacked counter-protesters.</div><div>
</div><div>But CPAC’s shooing away of far-right personalities, at least superficially, isn’t the sign of some conservative bulwark against far-right ideas.</div><div>
</div><div>Instead, CPAC this year has morphed into a celebration of Trumpism, not conservatism, and all the vitriol that comes along with it.</div><div>
</div><div><b>On Friday, for instance, Breitbart writer Michelle Malkin blamed moderate Republicans, including the “ghost of John McCain” for being in bed with “immigration saboteurs.” The crowd guffawed uproariously.</b></div><div>
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