Monthly Archives: April 2022

At the London premiere of The Northman in early April, the director, Robert Eggers, explained on stage how he was seeking to reclaim Viking history from rightwing groups. Many of these groups thrive on myths of an imagined European past: a time before racial mixing or progressive politics, when men were mighty warriors and women were compliant child-bearers.

As Eggers told the Observer recently, such associations almost put him off making The Northman. The macho stereotype of that history, along with, you know, the rightwing misappropriation of Viking culture, made me sort of allergic to it, and I just never wanted to go there. Eggers has spoken of his scholarly research and commitment to getting Viking history right, down to the smallest details. But as rigorous and accomplished as The Northman is, it might in fact be the kind of movie the alt-right loves.

The Northmans 10th-century society appears to be uniformly white and firmly divided along patriarchal lines. Men do the ruling and killing; women do the scheming and baby-making. Its hero, played by Alexander Skarsgrd, is not a million miles from the macho stereotype Eggers complained of a brawny warrior who settles most disputes with a sword and without a shirt. Skarsgrds love interest, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, could be the far-right males dream woman: beautiful, fair-haired, loyal to her man and committed to bearing his offspring. Even before the films release, far-right voices were giving their approval on the anonymous message board site 4chan: Northman is a based [agreeable] movie, all white cast and shows pure raw masculinity. Robert Eggers. He is restoring pride in our people with his great films. The Northman is going to be epic Hail Odin.

On the face of it, some images of Skarsgrd in The Northman bare-chested, pumped-up with battle rage, wearing a wolfs pelt as headgear are uncomfortably close to those of Jake Angeli, AKA the QAnon Shaman, the abiding mascot of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. On that day in Washington, Angeli was similarly topless and animal-adorned, his torso bearing tattoos of Nordic symbols now associated with white-supremacist movements, including a stylised Mjlnir (Thors hammer), Ygdrasil (the world tree of Norse mythology) and the Valknut (an ancient symbol of interlocking triangles).

The far rights love of Nordic lore goes back to the Third Reich and beyond, and the connection is stronger than ever. The deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was full of Nordic symbols on banners and shields. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who murdered 77 people in 2011, carved the names of Norse gods into his guns. The shooter at the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, drew Norse insignia on his possessions and wrote see you in Valhalla on his Facebook page.

Eggers would doubtless be horrified to be associated with such movements, but The Northman illustrates how cinema can be misappropriated in ways its makers never intended. In the past two decades, the entire cultural landscape and films about European history in particular has been weaponised and politicised by the far right.

A guide to the far-right mindset was created on Stormfront, the notorious white-nationalist site, in 2001. A contributor named Yggdrasil (there is that Norse mythology again) began a thread on content that we can watch repeatedly, laying out guidelines and making and soliciting suggestions. The thread now runs to 154 pages.

Yggdrasils criteria for what qualifies as a good white-nationalist film include: Positive portrayal of whites in defense against the depredations of liberalism, crime, and attack by alien races; Positive portrayal of heterosexual relationships and sex, marriage, procreation and child rearing; Portrayals of white males as intelligent, sensitive and strong in positive leadership roles and or romantic leads; and Particularly intense portrayals of white female beauty, in non-degrading roles. Disqualifying themes include homosexuality, racial mixing, negative portrayals of Christianity and portrayals of white people as inferior.

The Northman pretty much ticks all these boxes, but then so do many other movies. Indeed, if you are looking for a Hollywood movie to support white-supremacist beliefs, you dont have to look very far.

Some of Stormfronts film recommendations are predictable: The Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, Braveheart, Zulu, a lot of Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Clint Eastwood. Few will be surprised to see The Lord of the Rings movies come highly recommended. Neither JRR Tolkien nor Peter Jackson consciously framed the fantasy epic as white-nationalist propaganda, but, as with Nordic mythology, it harks back to an imaginary Eurocentric realm in which the heroes are considered to be white-skinned (and were cast as such in the movies) and the chief enemies, the orcs, are characterised as dark-skinned, ugly and uncivilised.

Derek Black, the son of Stormfronts founder, Don Black (a prominent Ku Klux Klan leader), even started a dedicated Lord of the Rings section on the website as a teenager. I figured you could probably get people who liked such a super-white mythos a few of them are probably gonna be turned on by white nationalism, he told the New York Times in 2017 (Black renounced his white-nationalist beliefs in 2013).

More recent medieval sagas have been venerated by the far right for similar reasons. Game of Thrones, for example, also set up a dynamic of white, northern Europeans battling darker-skinned nomadic barbarians (the Dothraki), who come to be led by a pale-skinned, fair-haired woman. The far right heartily approved of Zack Snyders action epic 300, in which heroic, muscular, barely clothed Spartan warriors bravely repel an invading army of Persians. The contrast between these manly action heroes and the anonymous keyboard warriors who idolise them is difficult to ignore.

Other recommendations on Stormfronts list are more surprising, such as Notting Hill. Few would have marked the Richard Curtis romcom as a key white-nationalist text, even if it was criticised at the time for excluding people of colour from its multicultural London neighbourhood. But, from the perspective of a white-nationalist blogger, Notting Hill is a story in which the white victims of culture destruction manage to extricate themselves and find happiness.

In recent years, the far right has been more strident about movies it doesnt like, which is almost everything. On social media and chatrooms such as 4chan and Reddit, far-right posters overwhelmingly white and male vilify Hollywood output, usually for being too inclusive, progressive or woke. Targets have included the all-female remake of Ghostbusters, the new Star Wars movies, Doctor Who and the Marvel films. As well as criticising, the far right has mounted coordinated attacks to lower these movies scores on reviews sites such as Rotten Tomatoes.

Theres a definite element of: The movies that we loved when we were kids are not as good any more, which is partly because youre not a kid, says Alan Finlayson, a professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia. He led a three-year research project on the far right and its use of digital platforms. From its point of view, says Finlayson, western culture is being continually corrupted, usually by an ill-defined power base (Jewish people, Marxists, liberals). The paradox of these kind of groups is that, on the one hand, they are claiming theyre deeply attached to western culture and civilisation, but they also hate western culture and civilisation, because its awful and decadent and liberal. So theyve got to kind of maintain these two things at the same time.

Harry Potter is an example of that, says Finlaysons colleague Rob Topinka, a senior lecturer at of Birkbeck, University of London. Referring to Harry Potter fandom is a shorthand way of saying mainstream liberal women and their kind of political thinking. But, at the same time, they call people who have been vaccinated mudbloods and adopt the name pureblood for themselves. So a lot of this is incoherent.

The far right also engages in more in-depth forms of movie commentary, via YouTube videos and podcasts. Far-right figureheads Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin host a podcast that conducts 90-minute analyses of movies such as Tenet, GoldenEye and Midsommar, parsing their supposedly hidden meanings, often through a male-chauvinist and antisemitic lens. Midsommar, which deals with Scandinavian folklore in the present day, did not go down well. Brahmin described it as a deep insult against our people.

We could see these activities simply as extreme forms of film criticism, but Josh Vandiver, a lecturer at Ball State University in Indiana who studies rightwing appropriations of popular culture, prefers to describe them as metapolitics. If politics is the occupation of territory, metapolitics is the occupation of culture, he says. They are, at some level, creating a community. They comment upon films; they try to interpret them. Thats what they do together, at least publicly. And we could contrast that to more traditional forms of political organising that the far right for decades has not seen itself as able to do: marching in the streets or organising political parties. So, instead, they spend all this time on metapolitics.

It would be easy to blame the far right alone for this situation, but it has been given plenty to work with by Hollywood and academia. By and large, films and the histories from which they draw have been overwhelmingly controlled by people of white, European descent, whose own blind spots might well play into the far rights hands. Especially when it comes to matters of race.

After the Charlottesville rally in 2017, Dorothy Kim, an Asian American medieval literature lecturer at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, argued that medieval studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long time. Academics had not done enough to counter myths that medieval Europe was a bastion of racial purity, said Kim, who was attacked by academics and the far right as a result. These myths were largely established by 19th-century historians with nationalist agendas, but more recent research reveals that societies such as those in Viking-era Scandinavia were in fact multicultural and multiracial.

These people were travellers. They ranged far across Europe and the Arctic and they engaged and mixed with neighbouring cultures. While they were highly gendered societies, a recent Finnish study also found evidence of gender-transgressing or gender-mixing practices, often of an openly sexual quality, among such societies. Eggers himself pointed to recent DNA analysis of the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior found in Sweden, which identified them as female. (Apparently, she is briefly included in The Northman, but viewers may struggle to spot her.)

The far rights love of medievalism was never about historical accuracy, says Kim; it was always about constructing narratives. Invoking the medieval past has now become a more generalised sign of the alt-right, she says, pointing to recent far-right terrorists and their scattershot allusions to Nordic lore. The point is not the specifics of the historical detail or what certain medieval things may mean to certain subgroups. Instead, the point is to gather them all for the maximum amount of attention, to plant as many flags to say: I am a white supremacist, and to activate other white-supremacist terrorists globally.

When it comes to movies such as The Northman, considerations of accuracy or research are red herrings, Kim says. Ultimately, these are creative choices. What I am interested in is how to make their vision of the medieval past and, in this case, the medieval Scandinavian past, not some sort of catnip for white supremacists to use for future violent attacks.

Is such a goal achievable? Hollywood can create counternarratives without betraying the history or mythology. Amazons forthcoming Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, has made a point of casting non-white actors to play elves and dwarves. Going slightly deeper, David Lowerys atmospheric The Green Knight, released last year, reinvigorated Arthurian legend a space as traditionally all-white as Viking history by casting the British-Asian actor Dev Patel as Gawain. (To his credit, Guy Ritchie did something similar, albeit to less acclaim, in his multicultural King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.)

In terms of Norse mythology, look at Marvels handling of its Thor movies. Kenneth Branaghs opening instalment was attacked in 2011 for casting Idris Elba as the Norse god Heimdall. As Elba said at the time: Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers. Thats OK, but the colour of my skin is wrong? White-supremacist groups attempted to organise a boycott of Thor, but it had no significant impact on the movies box office takings.

Taika Waititi, who is of Mori and Jewish descent, took things even further with part three, Thor: Ragnarok. As well as casting Tessa Thompson, a woman of mixed African, Latino and European heritage as the ostensibly bisexual Norse warrior Valkyrie, Waititis film dealt with narratives of displacement, enslavement, colonialism and white-male fragility. Thors all-powerful hammer, Mjolnir, that beloved symbol of white supremacism, is casually disintegrated by Cate Blanchetts Hela. She then proceeds to bring down the Norse realm of Asgard, figuratively and literally.

Look at these lies, she says, stripping away a ceiling fresco to reveal an older one beneath, detailing how her father, Odin, built Asgard through violent conquest. Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it. Judging by the trailer for the next instalment, Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi is continuing down this road. There are hints of homoeroticism, while somehow Natalie Portman now wields Mjolnir. The far right is going to hate it.

In an ideal world, film-makers wouldnt have to give a moments thought to how their films might be co-opted by these groups; we could simply enjoy a movie such as The Northman as a piece of rousing, skilfully made entertainment. The fact that it is no longer possible to do so could be seen as a victory of sorts for the far right, but failing to consider the stories we tell from first principles could be part of the problem that created them in the first place. By this stage, in fact, film-makers ought to have realised that if the far right doesnt hate your film, you might be doing something wrong.

This article was amended on 22 April 2022 to clarify details of Tessa Thompson and Dev Patels heritage.

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Norse code: are white supremacists reading too much into The Northman? - The Guardian

GIG HARBOR, Wash. Christopher Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an On Air light in the hall so his wife and two children dont barge in during broadcasts.

Ill do Tucker and then pop out and have dinner, Mr. Rufo said recently at his home in Gig Harbor, Wash., thousands of miles from the nations media and political capitals.

Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools.

Mr. Rufo has taken aim at opponents of a new Florida law that prohibits teachers in some grades from discussing L.G.B.T.Q. issues and that critics call Dont Say Gay. He declared moral war against the statutes most prominent adversary, the Walt Disney Company. And he has used the same playbook that proved effective in his crusade on racial issues: a leak of insider documents.

On Tucker Carlson Tonight, Mr. Rufo shared video last month of an internal Disney meeting where a producer spoke of adding queerness to an animated series and mentioned, tongue in cheek, her not-at-all-secret gay agenda.

To conservatives, the video was proof that Disney was sexualizing children.

Weve caught them on tape and the evidence is damning, Mr. Rufo declared. The story ricocheted through the conservative media ecosystem. Fox News alone ran dozens of segments critical of Disney.

On Friday, Mr. Rufo appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the signing of a bill known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which bars teaching in workplaces and schools that anyone is inherently biased or privileged because of race or sex. Mr. Rufo, who consulted on the bill, warned Disney that an in-house program it had run that urged discussion of systemic racism was now illegal in the state of Florida.

The signing was the culmination of Mr. Rufos long campaign to short-circuit corporate and school efforts at diversity and inclusion training. He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, he wrote on Twitter last year.

Friday was also a milestone in Mr. Rufos latest fixation. As he looked on, Mr. DeSantis signed a second measure abolishing Disneys special tax status in the state.

The retaliation against Disney emerged after its opposition to the Parental Rights in Education law, signed by Mr. DeSantis last month, which bans classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity for children below fourth grade, and limits it in older grades. The anti-L.G.B.T.Q. statute is part of a political brawl unfolding in an election year as both parties try to excite their bases. Republican lawmakers in multiple states have proposed measures similar to Floridas.

Mr. Rufo is convinced that a fight over L.G.B.T.Q. curriculums which he calls gender ideology has even more potential to spur a political backlash than the debate over how race and American history are taught.

The reservoir of sentiment on the sexuality issue is deeper and more explosive than the sentiment on the race issues, he said in an interview.

Critics of Mr. Rufo, and of the broader right-wing push on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, say the attacks represent a new era of moral panic, one with echoes of slanders from decades ago that gay teachers were a threat to children. Some champions of Floridas law, including Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantiss press secretary, have labeled their opponents groomers adults who want to sexually pursue children.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said conservatives had falsely and intentionally linked child sex predators with opponents of the Florida law. Mr. Rufo, he said, had provided fuel for their arguments.

This is the stock-in-trade of Rufos brand of activism creating these very negative brands and then associating things that might have much more popular support with those brands to put people on the defensive, Dr. Moynihan said. Thats the through line you see between the C.R.T. stuff and the current groomer effort.

After Mr. Rufo released the Disney employee videos, he shared mug shots on Twitter of Disney workers who had been charged in child sexual abuse cases over the years, based in part on CNN reporting from 2014.

He failed to note, in an article he wrote about the arrests for City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, that none of the cases in the CNN report involved children at Disneys parks. Nor did he include Disneys response to CNN that the arrests were one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the 300,000 people we have employed during this time period.

In another article for City Journal, Mr. Rufo claimed that American schools were hunting grounds for teachers, and that parents have good reason to worry about grooming in public schools.

He cited data from a decades-old survey, in a study for the Education Department, but he omitted the studys declaration that the vast majority of schools in America are safe places.

Charlie Sykes, a founder of The Bulwark, a political site for anti-Trump conservatives, said Mr. Rufos association with the Manhattan Institute provided intellectual cover for flawed and inflammatory work.

It gives him this veneer of being a conservative scholar, Mr. Sykes said. He basically says, Anything you dont like about race becomes C.R.T. Now, all of your anxieties about sexuality or gender become grooming.

Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, defended Mr. Rufos work for giving voice to parents concerns about the ideological climate in public schools, specifically a lack of transparency over the teaching of contentious subjects.

Mr. Rufo denied that he had broadly equated opponents of the Florida law with groomers. Its wrong, factually and morally, to accuse someone of being a groomer with no basis and evidence, he said.

Its become a powerful word that should be used with great responsibility, he added. Nevertheless, some L.G.B.T.Q. people have reported an increase in harassment as the use of the term has surged online, echoing the QAnon conspiracy theorys fixation on a cabal of deep state Democratic pedophiles.

Mr. Rufo, 37, lives and works in Gig Harbor, a picturesque boating town on Puget Sound south of Seattle. A former documentary filmmaker and, briefly, an unsuccessful candidate for Seattles City Council, he burst on the scene in 2020 by publicizing examples of diversity trainings in government that seemed to have gone off the rails, such as asking bureaucrats to examine their complicity in the system of white supremacy. Diversity trainings, long a fixture in government and corporate America, typically support the idea that peoples unconscious biases involving race and gender can create hostile work environments.

His reporting in City Journal and posts on social media electrified readers, who leaked him more documents from anti-bias and diversity seminars.

C.R.T. is not new. Derrick Bell, a pioneering legal scholar who died in 2011, spent decades exploring what it would mean to understand racism as a permanent feature of American life. He is often called the godfather of critical race theory, but the term was coined by Kimberl Crenshaw in the 1980s.

The theory has gained new prominence. After theprotestsborn from the police killing of George Floyd, critical race theory resurfaced as part of a backlash among conservatives includingformer President Trump who began to use the term as apolitical weapon.

The current debate. Critics of C.R.T. argue that it accuses all white Americans of being racist and is being used to divide the country. But critical race theorists say they are mainly concerned with understandingthe racial disparities that have persisted ininstitutionsandsystems.

A hot-button issue in schools. The debate has turned school boards into battlegroundsas some Republicans say the theory is invading classrooms. Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, say that C.R.T. is not being taught in K-12 schools.

Perusing footnotes, he discovered the field of critical race theory. Originally a graduate-level academic thesis before conservatives turned it into political shorthand for a variety of teachings on race, it holds that racism is systemic in American institutions, not just a matter of individual bigotry.

Appearing on Tucker Carlsons Fox show in 2020, Mr. Rufo urged President Donald J. Trump to abolish critical race theory trainings in the government.

The next day, he said, he received a call from Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, telling him that Mr. Trump had seen him on Fox, and asking him to consult on an executive order. Framed in his home, Mr. Rufo has the pen that Mr. Trump used to sign the order, and a handwritten card from the White House: Who says one person cant make a difference?!

Although President Biden quickly revoked the order, critical race theory became a volatile political issue as Mr. Rufo and allies accused school systems of indoctrinating K-12 students.

The evidence was often thin, typically focusing on diversity training for teachers. But even as critics on the left called the attacks a diversion meant to exploit white grievances, the messaging resonated with many parents, who were already angry at school administrators about pandemic-imposed closures.

Critical race theory and a broader parents rights movement helped drive Republican victories in school board elections and the Virginia governors race last year. Seventeen states have passed laws or issued orders to restrict critical race theory or limit how public-school teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to Education Week.

Taking this issue and educating 175 million American adults in a very short period of time, its an astonishing thing, Mr. Rufo said.

His advocacy has been financially rewarding. Besides his Manhattan Institute position, he has a newsletter with 2,500 paid subscribers, and he runs a nonprofit entity to support his work, which he said had received over $500,000 in donations since late last year.

Mr. Rufo said he thought a great deal about selecting the right language to define what he opposed. A fan of postmodernist thinkers, he refers to the importance of meta-narratives. He said that to maximize voters anxieties about gender issues, he plans to write a series of articles on classroom practices he deems outrageous.

You have to provide the vocabulary for people to talk about gender issues, he said. Once that happens, its going to be explosive.

State Senator Shevrin D. Jones of Florida, a Democrat who opposed the states classroom law, called Republicans the party of buzzwords they use words like groomers to rally up their base.

In January, Mr. Rufo urged people to leak him documents, PDFs, audio-video and training materials related to gender, grooming and trans ideology in schools.

Three months later, as Mr. Rufo works on several projects including a book, his classroom series is still in its early stages. On Thursday, he published his first article.

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Christopher Rufo Fuels the Rights Cultural Fires in Florida - The New York Times

THE ARAB SPRING, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Green New Deal: one thing we can say about all of these movements however distinct in their goals, strategies, and tactics is that they managed to capture the public imagination, at least for a certain moment, with a hashtag. They manifested to varying degrees in city squares and streets, courtrooms, legislative chambers, and election campaigns, but its fair to say that, without the emergence of dominant social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, our social movements and politics since 2011 quite a history would be unrecognizable. And, maybe, more successful.

Gal Beckerman, in his new book, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, would like those of us who care about making social and political change to take a break from our scrolling and posting and consider what our social media are doing to us, what we may be losing. But rather than write yet another cyber-pessimist jeremiad, Beckerman gives us a series of richly detailed historical narratives, deeply researched and reported, ranging from France during the 17th-century Scientific Revolution to the working-class Chartist movement of 1830s Britain, from the anticolonial stirrings in Accra in the 1930s to the Soviet samizdat dissidents of the 1960s, and from the riot grrrl zines of the early 1990s on up to the Arab Spring, the alt-right, and the Black Lives Matter uprisings of recent years. In each case, it becomes clear that the means of communication, the media through which radical thinkers and movement builders interact, can be as important as the ideas being developed and shared.

A book like this isnt meant so much to inform our present fights for survival, democratic and social and planetary, as to help us step back and think about where the next radical ideas will come from, the ones well need if were going to get through a catastrophic century. The question is whether if we fail to get our heads out of our corporate-serving, profit-fueling feeds these ideas will come at all.

I spoke with Beckerman by video call from his home in Studio City on February 2.

WEN STEPHENSON: So, this is a conversation about people having conversations.

GAL BECKERMAN: Its true!

I admit Im deeply biased in favor of your argument in this book. Its been about a year now since I deleted my Twitter account and swore off social media. Best thing I ever did. [Laughs.] But my relationship to digital media goes back to 1994, when I was a young editor at The Atlantic helping dream up the online version of the magazine, and then co-creating TheAtlantic.com in 1995 and editing its web-only journal. And I was guardedly optimistic about the internet and digital media back then. I was less sanguine about their so-called democratizing potential. I think a lot of us sensed that corporations would figure out how to monopolize the new media, as capitalism always does. But what I failed to see coming was the dominance of social media. And I can honestly say that our social media saturation, and the damage its doing, is now beyond anything I ever imagined, even in my most dystopian moods. Now add to this background my experience since 2010 as a journalist and activist engaged in the climate justice movement, and you see where Im coming from. So, Im curious, whats the story of your own relationship to digital media and its intersection with politics and social movements?

They are kind of separate spheres. Theres how we understand the role of social media when it comes to our personal lives, and I think that people appreciate how strange and skewed the forms of communication online are, compared to what we know from real life. We understand that these are private companies that are hosting these platforms on which we communicate. They have their interests, which are opening up certain types of conversations and foreclosing certain other types of conversations. I think thats really in the bloodstream now. When it comes to social movements, though, I believe theres still a lot of dreaminess and sort of romanticizing of what it means to have a platform, an enormous megaphone that any person can have.

I became acutely aware of this around the time of the Arab Spring, when there was a lot of romantic talk about Twitter revolutions, and it seemed to me then, even in the flush of it, just watching it happen, that this was not sustainable. It was really great that they were able to call everybody to the square right away the scale and the speed cannot be disputed but it occurred to me how seductive that could be, to have a tool that allowed for that, and to believe thats the only tool that you need. And what happened in the Arab Spring and I didnt make this up, this is from conversations with people who were on the ground is they said to themselves, with some hindsight, we were so enamored with our ability to use Facebook or Twitter that we continued to do that, even the day after, when the dictator fell. Even in the best of circumstances, lets say Egypt, when they brought the dictator down, the next day they needed some other kind of tool to build themselves into a political opposition. And thats when it became clear that you cannot do that kind of work on Facebook and Twitter. Those platforms dont want you to do that work on there. Its not what theyre built for.

Are you a heavy user of social media? And have you ever thought about deleting your Twitter account?

[Laughs.] Oh, yeah, and I have definitely gone through periods of time where, lets say, I knew I needed a degree of focus and Ive deleted the apps from my phone or promised myself not to look at it before a certain time of day. I try to be as self-aware as I can about what its doing to me, or how Im being incentivized, what kind of speech Im putting out into the world. The other thing Im aware of with Twitter is Im not good at it. Because its not just about being witty or funny, its almost like this performative vulnerability. Its putting out certain parts of yourself in order to create an impression. And to be honest, if I could be better at it, Id probably do it too. Theres a lot to be gained these days in journalism and the media world by having 200,000 followers, its something that really has capital attached to it. But Im just not good at it!

The book is a great read, and one thing I appreciate is that its a book about media that contains almost no jargon and very little in the way of abstract theorizing. Instead, its built entirely on specific stories about specific people, at specific times and places, engaged in specific forms of movement-building and idea-forming. The argument of the book is actually quite simple and direct, and the books great strength is in the details and the narratives. Often, its the other way around a book will have an elaborate, complex argument and be weak on the details. So, tell me about the books argument and structure, and how it emerged.

I really appreciate that. The argument is a fairly simple one. Its that a radical idea, an idea thats going to undermine some fundamental aspect of our shared reality change the way we see things, the way we see ourselves, the way our relationship is to nature or to other people that an idea like that demands a certain amount of incubation.

Incubation is this process by which people can come together, and refine an idea, imagine different aspects of it without fear of being shamed. They can throw out certain things, egg one another on, push one another, but also gain a certain amount of cohesion as a group, if theyre going to become a social movement, and a sense of identity, of identification with each other and with the cause. All of this stuff, I believe, needs to happen, if not in a completely closed space, then a space thats quieter and slower than we have access to these days in our dominant media forms. So thats the argument of the book, and the idea was, what would it be like to do a book that starts in the 17th century, looking at the Scientific Revolution and how it sort of percolated through letters, as a medium, and ends with Black Lives Matter and the role that Twitter played in elevating that movement.

Initially, I was really drawn to certain kinds of stories. I did my first book about dissidents in the Soviet Union, and Ive always been fascinated by their use of samizdat, those underground, self-produced, typewritten journals and all kinds of things theyd produce in multiple copies and share hand to hand. Samizdat had a lot of value for those groups of people, because it was the only kind of intellectual currency they could create for themselves, and they had to do it underground, it was entirely subversive, sharing ideas that were not allowed in the culture at all, they could get people thrown into jail or sent to the gulags.

And my fascination with that happened around the same time as the Arab Spring, and the hoopla around the Twitter revolutions, and the contrast between these two forms of communication really struck me. And then I started casting backward historically, and thinking, is it possible to kind of reverse-engineer some of the movements weve come to think about as having been successful and see at their source a form of communication, a medium, that actually helped these groups of people begin to incubate their ideas? And a rich store of examples presented itself.

One of the themes or threads I found running through the book is the need for dissidents and movement-builders to connect with one another first as individuals, or as a small group, and to relate to each other as people, not as abstract avatars on a screen or aggregate numbers of followers. And certain forms of communication, as you argue, have been better at allowing this than others. But it always comes back to people, and the relationships between people. Can you talk about that? The Soviet dissidents are a great example, because they formed a tight community and really took care of each other as human beings. And it seems to have been similar with the riot grrrl community in the early 90s, which you write about, and the Black Lives Matter groups theres always this human element, and different forms of media can either help it or hinder it.

Yeah, one of the things thats occurred to me over the last few years is our confusion over what the word social actually means. Theres the social of being at a cocktail party and being in a room with a lot of people, and its really loud, a lot conversations and snippets of conversations, and youre moving from one to another, and then you come home at the end of the night and youre like, I dont feel like I really talked to anybody. Thats one kind of social. And then theres the social of, you know, five people sitting around a table with beers or coffee, and really sharing ideas, and maybe confronting one another about something one person believes. Both these things are social, but theyre very different and they can have different outcomes, in terms of the sorts of relationships that you build.

And for me, whats missing in our intense sociability I mean, were with people all day long online, constantly hearing hundreds of different voices is were not really listening to one another and building off of one anothers ideas.

You mentioned earlier that theres something performative about Twitter and Facebook, and I think thats crucial. Because its all public, all for an audience, whether you have a few hundred followers or a few hundred thousand followers, its still performative. And one thing you draw out in the book is that theres this need for people to have the space, the safety, to fail, to put your foot in your mouth, to just be wrong.

Absolutely, yeah.

And in the final chapter, on Black Lives Matter, I think you found perfect vehicles for illustrating these kinds of tensions.

Whats funny is I had written a Black Lives Matter chapter that I finished a draft of in December 2019, before the George Floyd protests. And that chapter was very elegiac, like, heres this movement that got overtaken by the social media metabolism. And then when it came back in 2020 in such an incredible way, it actually gave me an opportunity, because the activists Id gotten to know were familiar with the cycle now. They understood what it meant to have this moment of very intense attention and visibility, and how quickly it could dissipate, and how hard it was to translate that energy into the sort of granular local changes that they were trying to achieve.

Right, they had been through the wringer with social media, through that learning process. I mean, in most of the grassroots organizing spaces Im familiar with, the real work of organizing doesnt happen on social media platforms. And there can be a very fraught relationship between the organizing work thats going on and the public-facing social media interactions. Again, it all comes back to relationships and this basically human aspect of it, and a big part of that is the trust you need to build with the people youre working with.

Yeah, how do you build that trust when, lets say in the best of circumstances, only half of the reason someones saying something is so they can actually communicate with you and the other half is so that they can perform for the other however many thousands of people who are watching. Its like a conversation through megaphones.

Exactly. So, one thing I thought was interesting about the way you told the story of the BLM groups in Minneapolis and Miami was how it illustrates that the real work of organizing and social-movement building happens offline. Or at least, not in public on social media. You have the example of how Dream Defenders made a very intentional effort to get away from social media with their blackout.

They literally went offline.

Yeah, and most of the organizers I know spend very little time on social media they use it strictly as a tool because theyre too busy actually doing the work of organizing.

So, for the Dream Defenders this group in Miami that came out of the moment around the murder of Trayvon Martin, one of the earlier cases that was part of the BLM trajectory they had a very high-profile protest in Florida, and then the movement spread throughout the country, it blew up in Ferguson, and they felt they were constantly trying to catch up with what they felt was a value system of visibility and attention. They told me that this was a time when newspapers and magazines would list the most effective activists in the country, but do it in terms of their Twitter followers. So, you have to have an extremely healthy, almost an impossibly healthy ego to not be affected by that, to say, Im just going to do the work and Im not going to care about the attention its getting. And the attention also matters, by the way, because with the attention come resources, theres money to be had for nonprofit organizations if you can make your work visible.

All this was extremely confusing, or troubling, to these activists, because it felt like it scrambled their priorities. It made them see that there were things that needed to be handled or dealt with at the local level, but, as in much of our politics, they had to think nationally, in terms of how to gain attention on these big platforms. And to their immense credit, some of these leaders saw that they were going to get subsumed, they were not going to be able to have a real function anymore if they didnt sort of stop and pull the plug, and figure out what they called their DNA, who they really were, and what they were there for.

And as I write in the chapter, Rachel Gilmer, the activist with Dream Defenders I spent a lot of time with, told me that one of the first things they realized was that one of the big items on their platform, abolishing the police this was a very popular position on Twitter and within the community they were interacting with there as soon as they did this blackout, where everyone deleted their apps for, I think it was three months, and started talking to people in the communities they were ostensibly serving, walking door to door, just having conversations, they realized that people didnt really want to get rid of the police. Even if this group felt that was the ultimate goal, they were a long way off from convincing the constituency that they were supposedly speaking on behalf of. And so, the focus shifted entirely, and it became, lets not try to draw the most attention to ourselves, lets try to create environments where we can sensitize people to what community-led safety might look like. And lets get their ideas, too, not talk at them but actually hear what is working and what isnt working.

And then you write about the Black Lives Matter group in Minneapolis.

In Minneapolis, as we all remember, there was that dramatic moment in the summer of 2020 when the city council said they were going to get rid of the police. That was the most overt example of a municipality responding to the protests. But it didnt happen. The city council had promised it, but there was another body in the city thats in charge of the constitutional charter, and it said, no, this is not taking place. So, the only recourse, for the activists who had made this happen, was to get a petition going that would put the question on a ballot referendum, which was voted on in November 2021. My chapter ends with them embracing the petition effort here was an opportunity that was extremely local, like canvassing, they really had to figure out how to have conversations with people, convince them, get them on board with this idea, or figure out what version of this idea could possibly work and gain their support. I think they had to get 20,000 signatures. And they managed to do it, it got on the referendum, and it was voted down, 56 percent of the city voted that they didnt want to get rid of the police.

Well, on one level thats a failure, right? They tried to make this happen, and it didnt happen. But on another level, if you think of change as incremental, especially change thats this radical and it is radical, when you think of something as taken for granted as the cop in the blue uniform on the corner not being there anymore then going from zero to 44 percent, thats a pretty big increment, you know? And theyre not stopping.

You can have an opinion about their approach, or whether their goal is right or wrong, but from a purely organizing perspective, and having an idea that is very status-quo-busting, what worked for them was to get very local and have conversations. Thats what they told me, that at the end of the day, developing relationships with city council members that were sympathetic to them, and helping to get city council members elected who could represent their agenda, its old-school organizing, in a way, but its gotten kind of obscured.

Its local politics 101.

Thats right.

Heres one from the wayback machine. Back in 1999, I interviewed Lawrence Lessig about his book Code, which among other things made the basic point that there are political values and ideologies embedded in the design of software and computer systems, as much as in constitutions. What do you think is the ideology of Facebook or Twitter? Is it just capitalism?

[Laughs.] Thats what I would guess. I mean, its a business thats built on maximizing the amount of time people will be using their service. Its masked with a lot of fancy romantic talk about what it all means, but now I think some of that mask has dropped. But thats what it is: its a privately owned business that wants you to be on there as much as possible so that it can sell advertising, and do other kinds of things, with your data.

To me, whats interesting is thats the starting point theyre driven by these capitalist instincts but then what does it mean for the type of communication we can have on there, and the ways it can mold our thinking and our relationships to one another? Theres the Marshall McLuhan, medium is the message, slightly technological-deterministic thinking about what a medium can do. I feel like thats gone out of fashion, in a way, partly because it sounds so deterministic, like we dont have any power in this situation. Neil Postman is another thinker that I was very inspired by.

But I feel like we dont really engage enough with those ideas anymore. We understand that these are privately owned platforms that have certain biases, in terms of the kind of speech that they want to create. But then the next step, of asking, so what does that mean? How do we contort ourselves to fit that? Thats the part that was interesting for me in terms of understanding social movements. Because if you have an entire value system thats built out of those platforms, and out of what they want from us, then thats going to have a very wide impact on society as a whole, and certainly on (my specific lens) our ability to make change.

Ill mention one counterpoint. When I was on Twitter, every once in a while Id point out, in a critical way, the nature of these platforms. And I was tweeting to a lot of people on the left, people who arent white, cis, men like me, and issues of privilege came up. And I got this blowback which I take to heart that in some ways it sounded like I was putting down, or devaluing, the contributions of women and people of color and queer folks who had really found a voice and a kind of empowerment through Twitter.

Yeah, and I struggled sometimes in this book, because I dont actually think of it as a cyber-pessimist book that says we should switch off the internet. I really dont think that. I think theres absolutely a role for a Facebook or a Twitter, the kind of loud social media, giving anybody who wants it a megaphone, which wasnt allowed to happen in the past. What a glorious thing that that exists. I mean that genuinely. My problem is when we assume that thats the only thing that matters, and we ignore that there are other modes that we should also be communicating in.

And again, to use the Black Lives Matter example, this frustrates the activists themselves. Even though they see the value of it, they understand that the people who are good at it gain so much capital from that without having done the work. I have an example in the book of DeRay Mckesson, who became a sort of activist star at the time, and interestingly enough, I just did a podcast with him. But he became a symbol of the type of activist who I mean, DeRay was actually on the ground in Ferguson doing real activism, he wasnt just sitting and tweeting at home but nevertheless, he has like a million people who are following him, and it bought him a lot of access. He said he went to the Obama White House so many times that he stopped being nervous about going. He was on late-night TV shows. And he was speaking for an entire movement. And not only because he was good at Twitter, but largely because he was good at Twitter.

And so, even if youre coming from a perspective that says heres a medium that gives voice to the voiceless, if it allows somebody, just because they really understand how to work it, to gain that much more power from it without any kind of accountability or, not in DeRays case but other peoples, not actually doing the work that can be very frustrating, even for people who see it as an empowering tool. Because it empowers the wrong people, or for the wrong reasons. So, Im saying yes, but we shouldnt discount how important it is that these tools exist, but we need to see them as tools, that they have their particular function, and are not the be-all, end-all.

Wen Stephenson is an independent journalist, essayist, and activist. A frequent contributor toThe Nation and The Baffler, he is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe and has written for many publications, including The Atlantic,Slate,The New York Times Book Review,The Boston Globe, andThe Boston Phoenix.He is the author ofWhat Were Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice(2015).

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We're Not Really Listening to One Another: A Conversation with Gal Beckerman - lareviewofbooks

When it comes to fighting for democracy and climate change two of Jamie Raskins top priorities the whole thing feels a bit like a game of chicken and egg to the Democratic congressman.

On the one hand there is the planet, heating up quickly past the limit that is safe and necessary for human survival, while Congress stalls on a $555bn climate package. On the other, a pernicious movement, spurred by Donald Trump and other rightwing conspiracy theorists, to upend voting rights protections and cast doubt on the current election system.

But Raskin, a progressive congressman from Maryland, is clear about which comes first: he said America cant fix the planet without fixing its government.

Weve got to save the democracy in order to save the climate and save our species, he said in an interview with the Guardian in collaboration with Reuters and Climate One public radio, as part of the Covering Climate Now media collaboration.

Later Raskin added: Were never going to be able to successfully deal with climate change if were spending all our time fighting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and Ku Klux Klan, and the Aryan nations and all of Steve Bannons alt-right nonsense.

In the past two years Raskins popularity has surged, picking up fuel after his closing remarks at Trumps second impeachment trial in early 2021, which he led on behalf of House Democrats. This trial is about who we are, he said then, in video clips shared millions of times. His impassioned and meticulous rhetoric are a clear intersection of his past as a Harvard-trained constitutional law professor and son of a progressive activist.

But it was an exceptional speech also because of the circumstances in which it was given, which both took place in the span of just a week. The first the loss of Thomas (Tommy) Bloom Raskin, the congressmans oldest son, who died by suicide at the tail end of 2020 after a long battle with depression. Just six days later Trumps followers stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to decertify the election results.

Raskin, who said Tommy hated nothing more than fascism, was moved to help lead the response to the insurrection through the Houses January 6 select committee.

His fight to convict Trump is not only about holding the former president accountable. Its about sending a message to the country that no other crisis, even the existential threat of the changing climate, can be solved without first protecting the fabric of American democracy.

I think for me the struggle to defend the truth is a precondition for defending our democracy, and the struggle to defend our democracy is a precondition for taking the effective action that needs to be taken in order to meet the climate crisis in a serious way and turn it around, he said.

This concept plays out clearly in the countrys uneven political representation. The majority of Americans think the government should be doing more to reduce the impacts of climate change, including taxing corporations based on their carbon emissions. But issues like partisan gerrymandering, where politicians manipulate voting district lines, often allow rightwing politicians to retain disproportionate power across state governments.

The key to understanding the collapse of civilizations is that you get a minority faction serving its own interests by dominating government, he said, referencing Jared Diamonds book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. And then everything collapses, usually through the exploitation of natural resources to a point where its unsustainable and untenable. That fits pretty perfectly the situation that were in with the GOP and climate change today.

Raskin was an early adopter of the Green New Deal, and during the pandemic he sought to block his fellow representatives from using Covid relief money to further fossil fuel interests. His commitment extends to his personal life, where inspired again by Tommy he is a devout vegetarian, convinced that new science and technology will render a meat-centric diet unnecessary.

But the stakes for protecting the Democratic partys climate agenda are especially high right now. The climate protections in Joe Bidens ambitious Build Back Better framework have been drastically whittled down. With the midterm elections revving up, and Republicans expected to dominate in state and local races, Democrats face a small window of opportunity to advance their promise of new jobs and tax credits to incentivize a shift to cleaner energy.

Those same midterm races are rife with candidates who are following Trumps big lie that the 2020 election was not legitimate and continue to hack away at voting rights protections, such as mail-in voting and weekend voting hours.

Raskin remained optimistic about Congress passing climate legislation, noting last years climate-friendly infrastructure bill, but said the party must always be realistic about what that means, even if it denotes considering alternative energy legislation via Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has stood in the way of several progressive bills in the Senate. (Manchin was also a critical roadblock in Raskins wife Sarah Bloom Raskins nomination to the Federal Reserve Board.)

The democratic governments and democratic parties and movements of the world have got to confront this reality. Nobody else is going to do it, Raskin said.

There isnt much leeway when it comes to enacting change. Storms are getting stronger, people are being displaced from their homes, and anti-science politicians are gaining more ground. But Raskin, armed with his fathers message to be the hope and his childrens sense of urgency around climate change, is confident his side is going to win.

We should cut the deals that need to be cut but from a position of power and strength by mobilizing the commanding majorities of people across America that believe in climate change and know that we need to act.

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Jamie Raskin on the climate crisis: Weve got to save democracy in order to save our species - The Guardian