Alex Has Opinions 3/11/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/11/21

How Wanda Maximoff Became the Ultimate Karen

But her Black friend on the MCU show WandaVision forgives her, so it’s all chill, right?

The show Wandavision (2021) marked the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) Phase 4 — a master plan Marvel Studios and Disney have for over 24 movies and TV shows over the next 4 to 5 years. It also signifies the first live-action MCU show on the Diseny+ platform. Now that the first (and maybe final season) has ended, we are left deciding what exactly this show means, both for the MCU and as a standalone piece of art.

At the center of the show is the titular Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). She is a magical being of immense power who drives much of the story's events. In her struggle to grieve her former partner, Vision (Paul Bettany), who was killed during the events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), she transforms the entire town of Westview, New Jersey, into an idyllic sitcom community — replete with a theme song and comedic gags. Although fun to watch at first, the lengths Wanda goes to process her grief leads to some dark and regretfully problematic places. There is no line she will not cross to avoid acknowledging her pain, including treating the townspeople of Westview as playthings.

As the credits for WandaVision’s finale roll, we are left with a show that seems to excuse the many, many atrocities Wanda commits under the pretext of processing loss. Inflicting hurt, it seems to imply, is okay as long as the person doing it is hurting too.

An MCU property is always difficult to dissect because the franchise is so much larger than any one piece of media — something meant both literally and metaphorically. These works, by design, tie not only into a cinematic universe over a decade in the making (as well as almost a century of comic book lore) but also a much larger debate about the Disney company’s place in the media landscape. Many critics are not happy with how this company has shaped a bevy of topics, ranging from IP law to jingoist portrayals of the military. This subtext exists for any conversation about the MCU, whether we want it to or not.

Wanda further complicates this narrative because her portrayal has historically played into a series of sexist tropes as well. She was originally a villain in the comics — a child of Magneto, serving in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — before becoming a member of the superhero team, the Avengers. The idea of her being a threat, however, lingered for decades. The early 2000s had several story arcs where Wanda goes mad and cannot properly handle her powers. The most notable examples of this are the Avengers Disassembled and the House of M storylines, where Wanda suddenly remembers her former children and warps all of reality to get them back. This power is depicted as being beyond her control, and ultimately she culls much of the mutant population on a whim.

This trope of the unstable, overpowered women is a common one in comic books, and really, media in general. We see it replicated with the character Jean Grey from the X-Men. She becomes possessed by the Phoenix Force in the Dark Phoenix Saga (1980) and loses control, accidentally exterminating billions of people. The sweet schoolgirl Carrie (Sissy Spacek) in the 1976 film of the same name goes on a homicidal killing spree with the emergence of her telekinetic powers shortly after her first menstruation. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) in the HBO show Game of Thrones (2011–2019) annihilates thousands of people in the city of King’s Landing after losing several close attachments. When you look at our media’s recent and not-so-recent past, there are many examples of women going crazy and burning everything to the ground.

This idea in our collective mythology that women cannot control themselves ties into the archaic concept of hysteria, which itself is named after the Greek word for womb, hystera. Many ancient Greeks believed that the uterus roamed throughout the body, putting pressure on other organs. Women were believed to be weaker creatures as a result. Hysteria was blamed for everything from kleptomania to run-of-the-mill sickness. It basically became a catchall for everything men found wrong with women, and we are not far removed from that legacy. Hysteria remained a diagnosable mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980.

It’s obvious in retrospect that these views were guided by intense misogyny. Many of the classic “cures” for hysteria include such gems as placing good smells by the vagina, stimulating an orgasm, and marriage. Women were often treated as a thing to be cured, rather than people to be understood. When you blame all the evils of the world on a woman opening a box or jar, or biting into a fruit, it’s not hard to see how that mentality comes to infect not just our theories of medicine, but our stories as well.

In the comic book version of the marvel universe, Wanda fits the mold of Eve or Pandora. She restructured the universe by wiping away mutants from the world, and that impression has not left her character. We see a shell of this archetype in the WandaVision series as well. As antagonist Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) tells Wanda in the final episode, The Series Finale: “It’s your destiny to destroy the world,” hinting that the MCU may not be finished with using Wanda as a harbinger of destruction in the future.

While not abandoning all the tropes we mentioned, the creative team behind WandaVision appears conscious of the fact that making Wanda hysterical in the current era is not a good look. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer told the publication Total Film point-blank: “It was extremely important to me that we not do the lazy thing of having a superpower lady who can’t handle her powers and goes crazy.” The show tries not to portray Wanda as unhinged or hysterical but rather as someone suffering from trauma. This decision doesn't make her loss of control intrinsic to her wielding power (at least not entirely that) but related to unaddressed psychological damage. She regresses into the sitcom world of Westview not because she is a woman but because she has suffered abuse.

Yet the loose plot beats of Avengers Dissambled and The House of M still remain largely intact. The loss of a loved one — in this case, Vision, instead of her children — causes her to spiral out of control and reshape reality so she can have him back. Wanda may not be treated as a mad dog that must be put down for the good of the world, but she still loses control of her powers because of her emotions. She recklessly (and, one can argue, selfishly) projects her repressed feelings onto the material world. Though admittedly on a much smaller scale than in the comics, she hurts countless people in the process of trying to come to terms with this grief — and we do not see true accountability occur by the time the final episode airs.

WandaVision may have been trying to soften our perception of Wanda by pivoting to a story of her grappling with her trauma, but a new problem arises in the process. We are left with the portrayal of an extremely privileged woman, someone so privileged she can literally bend reality to her will, who hurts others to process her own feelings.

In other words, a Karen.

Wanda is very clearly buckling under the weight of years of trauma by the time we get to WandaVision. When we look at her participation in the MCU, she has very valid reasons for that pain: she was a refugee, a test subject and victim of Hydra’s weapon program, and a person who lost both her brother and her lover Vision. Deciding to center a story on that ordeal is not inherently bad, and we frankly need more narratives that talk about people processing grief and pain.

This account is complicated, however, by the fact that Wanda is not an ordinary person. She is so powerful she basically borders on godhood, and as we have already established, she uses that power to transform the town of Westview into an idyllic sitcom. She casts a magical Hex over the entire town that allows her to control every aspect of it, including the townspeople inside.

There are countless different ways people react to trauma. Sometimes people withdraw inwards. They isolate themselves from close attachments and engage in escapism through various means, including but not limited to narcotics, video games, television. One study indicates a correlation between binge-watching and depression and anxiety. Wanda is shown using sitcoms in such a way from a very early age, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) as an escape from the traumas of war-torn Sokovia. Her magical manipulation of Westview can be seen as her engaging in the ultimate form of media-driven escapism.

Another way people can react to trauma is to inflict abuse on others. There is a link between those who bully and those who are bullied themselves. Some research indicates that a minority of people who are abused will abuse others, and of course, the ability to perpetuate that harm depends on how much privilege you have over the person you are abusing. We see abuse is rampant in romantic relationships, workplaces, and really any relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic. A minority of abuse victims inflict harm on their own children, contributing to an intergenerational cycle of abuse.

Your ability to inflict harm directly correlates with the power you hold over someone else and Wanda holds power over everyone in the town of Westview. She controls what the townsfolk can do, where they can go, and even what they can think. She has actively suppressed much of their identities to fit her escapist fantasy, and they want to be freed. As one town member named Dottie or really Sarah (Emma Caulfield Ford) pleads to Wanda upon being temporarily released from her hold:

“I have a daughter. She’s eight. Maybe she could be friends with your boys. If you like that storyline. Or the school bully, even. Really anything, if you could just let her out of her room. If I could just hold her, please.”

There is a term for someone that controls every aspect of another individual's life — and that’s a slave master.

Wanda has enslaved this entire town, and it's horrifying to watch. Yet, we don’t see her truly grapple with the repercussions of that decision. She understands that the townspeople hate her, but she doesn’t stay there to be held accountable for her actions. She flies off, retreating to a secluded mountain cabin to learn more magic.

In fact, the situation is made more tenuous when one of the series regulars, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), tells Wanda that the horrors she has unleashed on the town are a natural outgrowth of her powers. “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them…Given the chance and given your power, I’d bring my mom back. I know I would,” Monica reassures Wanda.

Monica, for context, is a Black woman, having to reassure a former white slaveholder that everything is okay. It’s an interaction that’s very painful to witness because it’s left ambiguous whether this woman of color is meant to be validating others' enslavement or merely bringing back someone from the dead. This problematically grounds the conversations in Wanda’s feelings. We are meant to think that her feelings of guilt are enough.

Wanda then vows to make things better. Not by trying to right the immense psychological trauma, she has caused to this community, but to gather more power. “I don’t understand this power, but I will,” she tells Monica. Taken out of context, this sentence is the perfect metaphor for privilege — someone unconsciously harming the community around them, not understanding what they are doing wrong, and then trying to right that harm by gaining even more power.

If she were truly interested in doing right by this community, she’d maybe start questioning if she should be free to wield so much more power in the first place.

WandaVision was an attempt by Disney to take Avengers Disassembled and the House of M's narrative beats and update them with modern sensibilities. They wanted to tell the same story, minus the sexist baggage and the vehicle they choose to accomplish that objective was an earnest exploration of trauma.

This idea was not inherently wrong, but the portrayal became a lot dicier when that person also enslaved an entire town to process said trauma. It created a story of both a victim and an abuser — one who ultimately does not do the work to repair the damage they have caused and yet still flies away as a hero.

This unresolved anxiety was not inevitable. We could have had a story where Wanda does all of the events in this series and then ultimately tries to make amends for that harm. It would have been beneficial to see the story of a privileged person who has undergone abuse, learning that that harm is not a justification for harming others. We could have seen Wanda pay a form of reparations to the Westview community she has harmed, providing a model to the viewer for how accountability should work in the real world.

Instead, Wanda blasts into the sky — the MCU setting up the pieces for some new fight — the town of Westview receding over the horizon.

This tension exposes a fault line that cut across the MCU before this show even aired. Someone like Wanda or Iron Man might seem desirable when they are firing off spells at a space tyrant or traveling through the multiverse to undo a galactic genocide, but decidedly not as much when they unconsciously trap an entire town or accidentally build a murderous AI. They have so much power that when they make mistakes, even unintentional ones, the consequences are catastrophic.

It’s not enough that our heroes process their feelings. They have to give up some of their power, too.

Alex Has Opinions 3/5/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/5/21

How Conspiracy Theories Took Over the World of Online Fashion

Online marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, and Zazzle have allowed hatred and misinformation to be marketed to the masses

The world of online fashion has been going through the same reckoning with white supremacist conspiracy theories as the rest of the internet. Platforms such as Etsy and CafePress were skewered shortly after the January 6 insurrection for hosting merchandise celebrating the event, which caused them to scramble to take some of the incendiary content down. If you type “QAnon” into sites such as Zazzle or Etsy, you will not get any hits, except for maybe a parody “QaNOPE” T-shirt.

This more aggressive posturing, however, has not rid these platforms of conspiracy theory merch. With minimal effort, you can still find everything from dog whistles to direct overtures. “The Letter Q, suitable for any occasions, birthdays, Christmas, QAnon…” reads the description for one Q sticker on the site Redbubble. “All legal votes matter,” reads a button sold on the marketplace Etsy, referring to the erroneous belief that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election. “Handed them out to patriots last week in D.C.,” explains the first comment underneath this product. The date posted is January 13; the implication is that they were present in D.C. when white supremacists stormed the U.S. Capitol.

These companies have remained indifferent to the rancor swirling about on their platforms, refusing greater regulation for an ad hoc system that removes their worst items while leaving everything else up for sale.

For decades, the online fashion industry’s lack of accountability has allowed hatred and misinformation to be sold at a discount. These companies have remained indifferent to the rancor swirling about on their platforms, refusing greater regulation for an ad hoc system that removes their worst items while leaving everything else up for sale.

When I talk about online fashion, I am referring to digital marketplaces for goods, where the seller uses the platform to hawk their wares. Sometimes these are platforms such as Etsy or Amazon, where the creator uses it to manage orders, payment, and promotion but handles the production and shipping themselves as well as print-on-demand services like Zazzle or Society6. The user uploads an image to print their design on an array of prefab products like mugs, shirts, and phone cases, but leaves the platforms to manage production and shipping.

This flexibility has allowed users to advertise (and in some cases create) products with a click of a button. Almost from the beginning of this industry, users were testing the limits of modern sensibilities with obscene content. Redbubble garnered criticism back in 2011 when a group of designers used the platform to promote their Hipster Hitler clothing line, replete with slogans such as “1941: a race odyssey” and “Death camp for cutie.’’ Amazon made headlines in 2013 when one of its vendors promoted a series of pro-domestic violence shirts that spoofed the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Gawker ran an article about all the conspiracy theory merch on sites like CafePress back in 2015. Zazzle was dragged in 2019 for hosting a design that hatefully read, “At least I’m not Jewish.”

These scandals have never really died. A quick scan of the web reveals dozens of controversies that have popped up over the years across all the major platforms. As recently as February of 2021, Redbubble was under fire for a vendor selling a miniskirt with the image of a recently deceased British army officer. The company responded with a short explanation and then removed that individual design from the platform. A similar design can still be found from a different vendor.

This same pattern emerges on an alarmingly frequent basis. These companies note that the offense has been found, retract the individual post or user, and then move on. They might adjust their internal processes to monitor or flag certain posts or keywords more efficiently — as Etsy did following the January 6 insurrection — but the overall problem remains in place. Hateful rhetoric and misinformation are still for sale on these sites. It just has to be a tad more clever or distinct in its presentation.

For example, when Redbubble eventually pulled the Hipster Hitler line all the way back in 2011, one of the company’s founders, Martin Hosking, committed to adjusting the company’s policy so that they would prohibit parodies of genocide as well as other offensive materials. Yet to this day, the ironic content of fascist dictators is still for sale on the site. If you were so inclined, you could buy a “reich” T-shirt in the style of the Friends logo or a “Papa Joe’s” sticker with a cartoon Joseph Stalin advertising “Better Ingredients. Better Gulags.”

Minor scandals may plague these platforms, but for every piece of problematic apparel that breaks headlines, countless more go unacknowledged.

Likewise, when New York Times writers Sapna Maheshwari and Taylor Lorenz penned an exposé about how white supremacists were using sites such as Amazon and Etsy to sell merchandise glorifying the insurrection, many of the companies were quick to take those designs down. The article specifically mentioned a T-shirt with the text “Battle for capitol hill veteran” being on Amazon, which is no longer hosted there. However, the same design is still on the site Etsy, which was not mentioned in the article for hosting that specific design. If your industry is being grilled in one of the most widely read newspapers in the country for hosting insurrectionist content, you’d think you have someone, at the very least, check to see if none of those designs are on your site. And yet, that clearly did not happen here.

This oversight represents a problem systemic to not just online fashion but really all digital platforms across the tech space. The high volume of content on sites such as Amazon or Zazzle means that they cannot have humans monitor all the content they house. They have to rely on algorithms, and because human language is constantly evolving, often that means mistakes like the ones we have mentioned slip through. As Tom Simonite writes in Wired regarding the difficulty with automating the detection of hate speech:

“Defining and detecting hate speech is one of the biggest political and technical challenges for Facebook and other platforms. Even for humans, the calls are tougher to make than for sexual or terrorist content, and can come down to questions of cultural sensibility. Automating that is tricky, because artificial intelligence is a long way from human-level understanding of text; work on algorithms that understand subtle meaning conveyed by text and imagery together is just beginning.”

The same logic applies to conspiracy theories. We might eventually reach a point where A.I. can automatically sort through all problematic content, but ultimately doing so effectively will require both better A.I. and firmer political stances. Companies will have to decide that certain stances are wrong, even before they break headlines on our news feeds — something that is far from our present reality. While companies might constantly be tweaking their algorithms to better detect hate speech and misinformation, they seem largely content to label the slips up we have noted as the cost of doing business — simply more data points to perfect their A.I.

This has created an environment rife with conspiracy theories for sale, and we have to ask ourselves if it’s worth it.

The problem with online fashion is really the problem with all major digital marketplaces.

One thing that cannot be underestimated is the scale of this problem: We are not referring to a mere one or two conspiracy-driven designs, but thousands scattered across the web. Minor scandals may plague these platforms, but for every piece of problematic apparel that breaks headlines, countless more go unacknowledged.

One prevalent type of conspiracy theorist merch is flat-earther ideology, which is the false belief that the Earth is flat. All other evidence to the contrary is believed to be part of a “round Earth conspiracy” perpetrated by our world’s major governments. If you wanted to, you could buy a “The Earth is Flat Do the Research” T-shirt on Etsy or a “Flat Earth Awareness” postcard on Redbubble with minimal effort. There has not been a serious attempt to curtail flat-earthers in the same way as anti-vaxxers and other more scrutinized conspiracy theories. This conspiracy theory is considered relatively benign by these platforms because it mainly generates misinformation as opposed to promoting neglect or violent action.

However, this merch is not as benign as it first appears. Not only do they serve as a funding mechanism for conspiracy theory platforms such as the Flat Earth Podcast, but they are also an entry point for adherents to expose others to these conspiracy theories. As one commenter wrote underneath the description for a model of a flat Earth they bought on Etsy: “I have it sitting on my dining table and people visiting me have been questioned me about it, which leads into interesting discussions and me explaining the geocentric flat Earth model to those who aren’t aware of it or who have a misconception of what it’s truly all about.”

The belief in one conspiracy theory makes you far more likely to believe in another one. This overlap is because conspiracy theorists are generally not trying to prove one scientific theory right or wrong. According to sociologist Ted Goertzel, they are instead trying “to prove that nothing is provable, that all assertions are arbitrary.” It’s a general distrust in our current systems of knowledge that belies a lot of conspiratorial thinking. This is why even nonviolent conspiracy theories such as those promoted by flat-earthers should be viewed with great caution.

Another area in online fast fashion rife with conspiracy theory merch is anything related to the coronavirus pandemic. The widespread and false belief that the coronavirus is fake has led to the creation of products that discourage mask usage. Ironically, many of these products are masks. “I’m only wearing this mask because I have to,” reads one mask on Zazzle. “Pointless placebo,” explains another. And again, there are hundreds of these items:

We see a similar skepticism with the vaccine. Many items encourage people to skip the vaccine altogether. “I do not consent,” explains the text for a long-sleeve T-shirt on Amazon, paired with the image of a person in a mask and surrounded by needles. This skepticism has even translated into merch perpetuating the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to insert microchips into people. “Bill Gates Eugenicist — Evil Vaccine Pusher,” exclaims another shirt on Redbubble.

In an age where there is an active political movement to prevent people from vaccinating against this deadly pandemic, these platforms permit far too much misinformation on their sites. It would take months to catalog all the various conspiracy theories easily searchable on the web, like the many bracelets featuring the words “Epstein didn’t kill himself,” stickers pleading for people to stop chemtrails, and placards challenging the credibility of the 2020 election.

As long as this merch doesn’t call for direct violence, these companies seem content to continue to host it — only removing items if they earn negative attention in the press or social media. Most of these platforms do not have community guidelines preventing the spread of misinformation (for example, check out the guidelines for Amazon and Zazzle). The ones that do (see Etsy and Redbubble) do not seem to be more effective at preventing conspiracy theory merch. Even if these policies were implemented across the industry (and that would be an excellent first step), it would not resolve the core issue.

All of the above platforms do have guidelines that discourage harassment and hate speech, and yet flat-out hatred is sold on them all the time. Want a “feminism is cancer” T-shirt? Buy it on Amazon. A sticker valorizing confederate general Robert E. Lee? Currently in stock on Redbubble. How about a shirt calling liberalism a mental disorder? Etsy has several in stock. If these guidelines were effective in stopping hateful products, you would think these examples would not be so easy to find.

The vastness of these platforms, coupled with an ad hoc editorialization process, means that gaps like the ones already mentioned will continue to exist for some time.

The problem with online fashion is really the problem with all major digital marketplaces. Whether we are talking about Etsy or YouTube, there are too many designs being published at any one time for there ever to be enough oversight. YouTube has over 500 hours of content published every minute. Etsy has over 2.5 million active sellers.

These companies rely on A.I. to filter out some of the most egregious examples. Still, the ever-changing nature of conspiracy theories and hate speech means that some examples will inevitability slip through the cracks. For example, the “I do not consent” T-shirt referenced earlier may have been used to virtue signal skepticism over the Covid-19 vaccine, but that same terminology could appear on anti-sexual assault merchandise. The acceptability of symbols changes depending on their context — a reality that alt-right groups have been very good at navigating. It’s all too common to see hate groups adjusting their language or appropriating new symbols to bypass censors.

Automatic censorship also has the drawback of potentially hurting marginalized creators who use similar language but under an entirely different context. Many LGBTQIA+ YouTubers, for example, noted their videos being demonetized when the platform attempted to regulate hate speech in 2019 more stringently. A.I. may be more efficient, but that efficiency can cut both ways.

The problem with conspiracy theory merch epitomizes a problem fundamental within the online industry. Companies are torn between their desire to turn a profit and their alleged desire to act ethically. They have built up these massive “unmanageable” systems under the assumption that they will one day be easier to control, and in the meantime, the purchasing of hatred is just a click away.

Alex Has Opinions 3/2/21 Alex Has Opinions 3/2/21

Why Can’t Disney Let Biological Parents Be Evil?

Behind the bias that pushes out perfect parents and wicked stepmothers

As a kid, my favorite Disney movie was the 1997 animated classic Hercules. It’s about the titular Greek hero (Tate Donovan) trying to prove his godhood so he can be reunited with his family in Mt. Olympus. However, he ultimately rejects his mantle so that he can stay with his love interest Megara (Susan Egan) back on Earth — in essence, repudiating the divinity of his biological family for a romantic partner he doesn’t even marry by the time the film comes to a close.

Even as a child, I remember being struck by how different this ending was from the normal Disney formula. We not only have a rejection, albeit a soft one, of the main character’s biological family but a positive portrayal of Hercules’s adoptive family. Amphitryon (Hal Holbrook) and Alcmene (Barbara Barrie) love their son until the end and are never depicted as anything but great parents. There is also Hercules’ trainer Philoctetes (Danny DeVito), who has a de facto familial role. “That’s Phil’s boy,” one character says of the hero Hercules.

If I had to sum up Disney in a single word, then that word would be family. When I look at the vast library of content they have produced over this last century, it’s overwhelmingly been devoted to stories glorifying this institution. It is a company that actively describes itself as a maker of “family entertainment.” We have hundreds of heartfelt tales of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, but rarely do we see loving stepmothers, step-fathers, adopted parents, and found family members given center stage.

When we step back and examine this larger trend, it’s hard not to see a bias towards biological parents in Disney’s utter reluctance to make them anything but good.

During the early years, the majority of the nonbiological parents in the Disney-verse were flat-out evil. We see this most prominently during the Golden (1937–1942) and Silver (1950–1959) eras of Disney, where wicked stepmothers dominated the Silver Screen. The Evil Queen (Lucille La Verne) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) detests her step-daughter so much she tries to kill her. Cinderella’s step-mother Lady Tremaine (Eleanor Audley), treats her more like a servant than a daughter.

Birth moms were regularly absent during these eras, often dying off-screen or very early in the film (see Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). This trend would continue into the Disney Renaissance (1989–1999), where characters such as Princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin) in Aladdin (1992) and Belle (Paige O’Hara) in Beauty and the Beast (1991) are likewise motherless. We would sometimes see mothers alongside their husbands, such as Mrs. Darling (Heather Angel) in Peter Pan or Fa Li (Freda Foh Shen) in Mulan (1998), but never as distinct people outside their roles as a wife, mother, or lingering memory.

Dead parents make some sense narratively. Orphaned children are a common story trope in media because they create tension and allow for children to see themselves as the protagonist without the messy interference of adults. It stands to reason that parents would be removed in a lot of children’s stories, but what doesn’t hold up to scrutiny is for that absence to be frequently gendered female. As Celeste Mora wrote in Bustle: “Disney’s legacy with parenthood is a mixed bag, and often it favors fatherhood over motherhood or guardianship of any kind.”

Left behind were often fathers, who, although sometimes clueless, distant, or even cruel, were never really bad. King Triton (Kenneth Mars) in The Little Mermaid (1989) may wreck Princess Ariel’s (Jodi Benson) treasures and whatchamacallits, but he’s ultimately supportive of her marriage to Prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) at the end of the film. The Sultan (Douglas Seale) in Aladdin is a clueless dote who lets his advisor Jafar (Jonathan Freeman) usurp way too much control over Agrabah, and yet he is also there for his daughter in the end. These eras were a time of missing mothers, wicked stepmothers, and okay fathers. It was a period in filmmaking that upheld patriarchal norms while simultaneously demonizing non-normative family structures.

It would take decades for the evil stepmother trope to be used less frequently, and it has truthfully never died. We would see a modern incarnation with Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) in Tangled (2010), a witch who actively gaslit her adopted daughter into thinking the outside world was a dangerous place so that she would never leave. Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla), in the TV series Once Upon A Time (2011–2018), plays an updated version of the Evil Queen. Although she is eventually redeemed, her initial portrayal is of the cold, domineering stepmother we are so used to seeing in Disney films.

Even as the Wicked Stepmother trope diminished, biological parents remained at the center of most Disney families. We would occasionally observe exceptions to this rule, such as the adoptive parents in Hercules, the stepfather in Onward (2020), and arguably Grandmother Willow (Linda Hunt) in Pocahontas (1995), but these examples remained on the periphery of their respective films. Pocahontas still has her father, Chief Powhatan (Russell Means), and the entirety of the film Onward is about the main character reckoning with the loss of his biological father.

Nonbiological family members are very few and far between in these stories, which goes against many viewers' lived reality. This objection may sound obvious, but it bears noting that millions of families have children who are adopted or are in the care of non-immediate relatives like grandparents, aunts, or cousins. Millions more are stepchildren from other marriages. Some of these relationships are good — others are not — and we don’t really see Disney reflect that reality. They are a company that has a clear preference in their filmography for one type of family structure. Unlike evil stepmothers, biological parents are rarely portrayed as anything but good. With the notable exception of Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), it's hard to find an evil birth mom or dad who comes anywhere close to Lady Tremaine or the Evil Queen.

If evilness is found somewhere on the family tree, it's almost always placed up a branch or two so that some psychological distancing can take place. Uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons) is the villain in The Lion King (1994). Grandfather Runeard (Jeremy Sisto) is the imperialist in Frozen II (2019). Grandfather Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is the mastermind in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Seldom are the protagonist's biological parents ever bad — it's always the distant uncle, aunt, or grandparent.

Some biological parents, though, are bad. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the number of maltreated children (e.g., children who endure physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect) is roughly 9 per one thousand. Those are the numbers that the government catches. There are probably millions of parents that skirt that line of abuse who never get caught, and children need narratives that allow them to label that mistreatment as evil.

In fact, this unwillingness to portray biological parents as evil reeks of a discriminatory trend that not only is inaccurate but often undercuts the very stories Disney is trying to tell.

When we look at Disney’s filmography, this refusal to demonize biological parents can take their narratives to some unusual places. For example, the central conflict in Frozen II is about how Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel)’s grandfather, Runeard, exploited the magical land of Northuldra to benefit his kingdom of Arendelle. He constructed a dam that weakened the Northuldra people and allowed Arendelle to build their capital in the newly drained lowlands. The story makes it painfully clear that no one else in the royal family was aware of this sleight so that they can lay all the blame on the grandfather alone.

Imperialism, however, is hardly an activity that a single individual can do by themselves. You don’t secretly perpetuate war crimes without your larger population willfully choosing to ignore them, especially members of the royal family who benefit from said war crimes. This narrative would have been better served by reflecting that emotional reality and making Anna and Elsa’s parents less than perfect, especially since their actions are largely responsible for the first movie's problems.

One of the main reasons Elsa had so much baggage over her powers in the first film, Frozen (2013), was that her parents decided to lock her away as a child. She was not able to control those powers initially. So they focused on isolating her as they worked on a cure — a decree Elsa internalized even after their untimely deaths. In the words of the blog Lady Geek Girl: “Elsa’s and Anna’s parents don’t abuse their daughters because they want something from them; they abuse them because they want to protect them, and they believe that this seclusion is the best way to do that.”

Frozen II could have reflected on how that trauma — although guided from a place of love — was ultimately wrong. It would have been a chance to contemplate how sometimes loving parents do terrible things out of misguided concern, but the movie isn’t willing to live in that shade of gray. The scene we have with her parents in Frozen II is a memory of them committed to curing their daughter until the end.

Another recent example of being unable to demonize biological parents is the animated movie Coco (2017)— a tale of a boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) as he finds himself in the Land of the Dead. Miguel has to race his way back to our world before being stuck in the Land of the Dead for good, and the only way to do that is to get a blessing from a deceased family member. A central tension is that Miguel’s great-great-grandmother, Mamá Imelda (Alanna Ubach), had a husband who walked out on his family to pursue his career as a musician, and she will not let Miguel leave the Land of the Dead until he renounces music for good.

Unable to give up on music, Miguel tries to track the spirit he believes is his great-great-grandfather, a talented musician named Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). When the two of them finally meet, Ernesto talks about how leaving his hometown and family was difficult, but ultimately that he is happy he pursued his dreams. We are left with a complicated portrayal far too common in our day and age: a parent forced to grabble between being fulfilled and raising a child in a society that doesn’t make it easy to do either. Ernesto selfishly chooses to follow their dreams to get what they wanted in life and has accepted the costs.

This complicated and refreshing portrayal is undone, however, by the time we reach the final act. We learn that Miguel’s real relative, Héctor (Gael García Bernal), wanted to go back to his family, but he was killed by Ernesto, his former singing partner, who sought to take credit for the songs they wrote together. The more human depiction of a man doing something selfish and having to make peace with the fallout is swept aside by a simplified tale that values traditional family values above all else. “Family comes first,” Miguel says to his great-great-grandmother shortly after the truth of Héctor has been revealed.

Once you start looking for this bias, it’s hard not to see how Disney will go out of its way to contort the narrative to favor biological parents. Sometimes these pivots are not as subtle as in Coco and Frozen II and can be downright offensive. For example, the main protagonist in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, Rey (Daisy Ridley), has an entire subplot around her lineage, and its conclusion is infuriating.

We are led to believe in the second film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2015), that her parents were people of no importance. They left her on the planet of Jakku to be an indentured servant, and they never returned. Since that realization upset some people for reasons too many to cover here, this conclusion was retconned in the sequel, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), so that Rey had more influential parents. Her grandfather became Emperor Palpatine — the evil antagonist who ruled the galaxy in the previous trilogy of Star Wars movies.

Her parents, however, do not fall within that orbit of evil because that would violate the norm of biological parents always being good. Rey has an entire flashback scene inserted into the narrative where we are reassured that these characters — people the viewers have never met — loved her all along. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), her nemesis and eventual friend, tells Rey that her parents “sold you to protect you.” It’s a cringe-worthy line that tries to justify slavery just so the narrative doesn’t have to cast her parents in a negative light.

There may be countless directors and creators behind these various properties; however, it's evident that the Disney company has implicit norms that it is hesitant to deviate from — and the divinity of biological parents is one of them.

When we talk about these movies, it's important to note that we are not trying to disparage one film or director specifically, but criticizing a trend decades in the making. There is nothing wrong with portraying biological parents in a positive light — in the same way that there is nothing wrong with putting water or trees in a story. They are simply a component that can be used or not used.

It’s the absences across a filmography and industry that are bothersome. The problem is the willful decision to center biological parents above other family structures on top of a history of demonizing alternative ones. That is the issue here. There are so many different, valid family structures that deserved to be seen — families with adopted children, stepchildren, and caregivers such as grandparents, family friends, uncles, and so much more.

Additionally, there are a lot of shitty parents too. Many people had biological parents who didn’t treat them well, and those children (and adults) deserve to feel like others shared their upbringings. When you are a company that claims to make family entertainment and don’t attempt to show the diversity of what a family can be, you end up making countless people feel alone.

As paradoxical as it sounds, the quickest way to put a smile on some viewers' faces is for Disney to allow their parents to be evil.

Alex Has Opinions 2/25/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/25/21

The World of Far-Right Social Media Thinks Everyone is a Clone

Inside the rationalization that keeps the QAnon conspiracy ticking.

After the January 6th insurrection, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the major social media platforms started to ban groups that promoted conspiracy theories. These recently booted alt-righters flocked to alternative sites such as Telegram and MeWe, where they continued more or less the same as they did before, claiming that a vast government conspiracy had taken over America.

On these fringes of the Internet, it’s common to see far-right conspiracy theorists allege ideas that border on the truly bizarre. Many are still convinced that Trump never lost the election. Entire groups are devoted to conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which supposes that an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the world. Some believe that liberals are extracting an imaginary substance called adrenochrome from children to keep themselves young.

Stranger still, many believe that politicians such as Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton are actually clones or elaborate deepfakes. These theorists exist in an alternate reality where nothing we see on the news is actually true — clues of which can be “discovered” in between the frames of government videos and decoded in the words of public statements.

This desire to “uncover the truth” is an old impulse that is not limited to the Internet's conservative peripheries. When we look at the annals of history, people have blamed clones for their problems for hundreds of years.

“More Arrests, Deaths & Resignation/Terminations. Down they go, one by one!” writes one user on the Telegram group Q-Tip. They posted this alongside a series of screenshots of news articles of various deaths and resignations, implying that these are people Trump has taken out in his war against the “deep state.” This post has been seen by over 67,000 users, with over 170 comments, and it's one of the thousands of similar posts on the Q-Tip page.

A major component of the QAnon theory is that Trump will eventually overtake these elites in an event called “the storm,” which is depicted as a biblical experience when he finally does drain the swamp of all of its nefarious elements. In the meantime, he is waging an allegedly secret war against this cabal of Satanists, who then use their influence in the press to “misconstrue” these events as resignations and deaths. Many of the posts on QAnon feeds are reposted screenshots users claim are “evidence” of the latest body count in this unseen and fictional battle.

Like most conspiracy theories, none of this information holds up to scrutiny. For example, one of the articles Q-Tip mentioned earlier in that post was an associated press piece about how Pennsylvanian state senator John Blake recently resigned his seat to work for US Representative Matt Cartwright. John Blake resigned at a public event covered by press outlets ranging from CBS to FOX.

Somehow we are supposed to believe that all of this was a ruse — reasoning that falls apart the moment you think about it more deeply. If an organization was powerful enough to control members of Congress and the Associated Press (as well as the half dozen press organizations present at this event), why would they still make the details of the cover-up public? Why not stage a heart attack or a car crash or, at the very least, a cover-up that doesn’t require a convoluted backstory with a sitting member of congress? And, of course, that’s the logical inconsistency from a relatively obscure person. This line of questioning becomes even more absurd for public figures such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who have come into contact with thousands of people.

The answer that has emerged from this corner of the Internet is that these people are fake. They are either cloned in some seedy science fiction lab controlled by the “deep state” or digital deepfakes (i.e., synthetic images or videos). “They are using clones. A technology that they have had for 50 years…But it’s not just Hollywood, it’s Washington, [the] Vatican, Royals, World Leaders, Famous People! From all over the world!” remarked one QAnon adherent on Telegram.

“BBC literally ran a story during…Christmas stating that the message from the Queen was a deep fake,” reads another post from the group We The Pepe. “Do you think the Queen is still alive, or do you think she’s 6 feet under?” This post implies that Queen Elizabeth the II has died and has long since been replaced by a series of deepfake videos and images. As of writing this, the queen is very much alive, but a scroll through these groups would have you believe that a host of living, breathing celebrities are actually a part of the conspiracy.

From Nancy Pelosi to Jeff Bezos, nearly every mainstream political figure has been accused of not being real by members of QAnon. Clones, doppelgängers, and bodysuits have been a facet of this ideology since the onset. QAnon is often cited as starting in October 2017 when a poster called Q made an obscure post on a 4Chan message board about how Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month. This event obliviously never occurred, and so adherents filled in the dots. According to some, she had been captured, and the deep state had replaced her with an actor or clone.

Even before Q’s first post, the idea that Hillary Clinton was not “everything she appeared to be” had been circulating for years. When Hillary collapsed of pneumonia on the campaign trail in 2016, conspiracy theorists took it as “evidence” that she was something else. Some claimed that she was relying on a body double. While others ludicrously asserted that in 1998 the entire Clinton Family had been eliminated and cloned beneath Camp David.

What compels someone to believe in something so truly bizarre?

We cannot know from a single post why an individual might cling to a conspiracy theory. Researchers have come up with a variety of explanations. Conspiracy theories correlate with higher social media usage and lower education levels (though all education levels are affected). A person might adhere to this way of thinking due to a desire for knowledge and certainty or maybe out of a longing for security. They may wish for a sense of cognitive closure. There’s even evidence that narcissism can also correlate with conspiracy theories, as individuals and groups scapegoat their failings onto a fictitious or real enemy.

A common element that seems to tie a lot of these disparate threads together is a longing for control. Conspiracy theories are prevalent in groups that do not have a lot of power or conversely perceive themselves as deserving of more of it. Some research indicates that conspiracy theories are prevalent in societies with less successful democracies, where trust in institutional authority is low. Others have argued that conspiracy theories are prevalent among disenfranchised groups rebranding themselves as “heroically in the possession of secret information.” Members of a dominant group, such as the white supremacists on the far-right, can use conspiracy theories as a pretext for why they should have even more power (e.g., we need to stop the clones).

Of course, none of this starts or ends with ludicrous claims on online message boards. Believers of QAnon have been linked to over a dozen violent incidents ranging from attempting to derail a freight train to kidnapping to trying to stage an insurrection of the US Capitol. QAnon adherents were there alongside other white supremacists on January 6th, and they will undoubtedly be participating in similar actions in the future.

While there may be a genuine sense of anger and grief among far-right conspiracy theorists, they are ultimately rationalizing the preservation of an authoritarian regime. They are clinging to any justification that lets them maintain the fantasy that Donald Trump is a hero, and the thing a lot of them have chosen to explain away all of his inconsistencies is that clones are real.

This theory may seem far-fetched, and it is, but as we shall see, the psychological foundations are centuries in the making.

“They also replace people with doubles. For many years they recruited look-alikes who would serve their ends. Now they are perfecting cloning technology that will let them replace anybody.”

That comment is not QAnon-related but is a post from a message board speculating whether actress Meagan Fox is secretly a clone. The self-proclaimed Doppelganger and Identity Research Society is a forum dedicated to unearthing the clones and body doubles of our society’s most rich and famous. This forum is filled with examples of people arguing that a wide range of celebrities, from Paul McCartney to Beyoncé, are not who they appear.

Spotting doppelgängers is a favorite pastime of these commenters, and it's a trend that’s been happening a long time. We talk of actors and politicians having clones and body doubles in the modern era. Yet, hundreds of years ago, the go-to explanation among many people was supernatural beings such as fairies, trolls, spirits, and elves. The word Doppelgänger, in fact, was a term coined by writer Johann Paul Richter in 1796 to describe a concept in German folklore of how all living creatures have an identical, invisible spirit acting as their double.

When we look at folklore traditions across Europe, we see these larger-than-life figures as forces of nature. Spirits such as fairies are blamed for everything from weather patterns to the success and failure of crops. For example, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the queen and king of the fairies, Titania and Oberon, are so powerful that their marital quarrel has disrupted the natural world. Their fight has caused rivers to flood and crops to wither.

One thing fairies and other supernatural beings were commonly accused of doing was abducting children and replacing them with an imposter, known popularly today as a changeling. These creatures were considered to be evil by many, and they were a cause for anxiety. As a character remarked to a concerned parent in J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860/62): “It is not your son you have got. The boy has been carried away by the ‘Daoine Sith,’ [spirits], and they have left a Sibhreach [changeling] in his place.”

Many parents were not happy with these alleged abductions and performed any task to get their original child back, ranging from animist rituals to tactics that were far more brutal. J. F. Campbell’s story starts with a father collecting empty eggshells to detect if their child is a changeling and ends with them tossing their “fake” boy into a fire. It was normal for parents to inflict intense abuse on these “imposters” in the hope that the faeries would feel bad enough for the changeling to bring the original child back. In the words of Richard Sugg in their essay Fairy Scapegoats: A History of the Persecution of Changeling Children:

“To the end of the nineteenth century, and probably later, such children were ritually abused by their own parents to this end. Immersed in rivers or placed at the margin of coastal tides, stood on hot coals or hung over fires, exposed in freezing weather, bathed in poisonous foxglove essence, beaten, threatened and subjected to forms of exorcism, these babies and children sometimes survived, sometimes not.”

A sad truth we must acknowledge with this history is that many of the changeling stories are of children who were sick, disabled, or neuroatypical. The child depicted in the Popular Tales of the West Highlands, for example, was discovered to be a changeling because he fell ill and “ took to his bed, and moped whole days away.” Other stories depict changeling children that are deformed or behaving erratically.

We see this in the etymological lineage of the word oaf (archaically spelled auf or alfe), which today means a stupid, uncultured, or clumsy person, but was originally used to describe a changeling child. The word is believed to trace its roots to the Middle English alven and elven, meaning fairy or elf. Its usage may have changed over the years to generally apply to an unintelligent person, but the original, ableist meaning survives in the words historical evolution.

The changeling myth was used as a subconscious pretext to give some parents “an out.” It gave them a sense of control in a world ruled by diseases and genetic disorders that they could not understand. It doesn’t make the routine torture of changeling children acceptable, but it does allow us, in a small way, to understand what was happening. These parents were using this conspiracy of faeries as a defense mechanism to reckon with suffering, and in some cases, as a way to misdirect their anger and shame over having a child with a disability onto the child itself.

That impulse to use conspiratorial thinking to explain away “bad things” has never left us. We see it today in how parents are convinced vaccines have given their children autism, condensing a complicated process we do not fully understand (i.e., why someone gets autism in the first place) to a single source they can control and ward against. It’s present in how people blame the coronavirus on 5G technology. Conspiratorial thinking is quite natural. As social psychology professor Dr. Karen Douglas remarked on the American Psychological Associations’ podcast:

“People have always believed in conspiracy theories. As far back as we can remember, people have been having these conspiracy beliefs and having these suspicions about the actions of hostile collectives of individuals. This is just the way that we are wired up to some degree.”

There is nothing particularly unique about the conspiracy theories we see promoted by white supremacists, including the clones they believe control the world.

As we have just shown, people have been blaming their problems on a duplicate other for centuries. Fairies and other spirits may have been the justification hundreds of years ago, but now it’s a perverted understanding of science via clones and deepfakes. Members of the alt-right have used this mentality to create a world where they are the valiant heroes in a struggle against an all-powerful deep state.

There will undoubtedly be some adherents who abandon this justification now that Trump's power has diminished. Much of the QAnon worldview is centered on Donald Trump, and despite what many may claim, he is no longer in office. There is only so much cognitive dissonance that some individuals will be able to maintain before setting the QAnon conspiracy away for good. As one of them recently posted in the group R Trust the plan:

“I feel abandoned. Trump was supposed to save us from communism. I put my trust in him. It is now gone. There is no plan. It’s finally hitting me.”

It’s unlikely, however, that this burnout will affect the majority of adherents. After the attempted January 6th insurrection, a staggering 8% of Americans claimed that the QAnon conspiracy theory was “very accurate” in a Morning Consult poll. If the online activity we have noted is any indication, many will continue to believe in it. Once someone can explain away every inconsistency by saying, “a clone did it,” it becomes tough to argue with them.

We need to understand that this has nothing to do with facts and logic and has everything with finding a worldview that gives people a sense of control. Conspiracy theories are about allowing individuals to make sense of events and feelings they do not understand or wish to process, and it has been happening for a long time. People on alt-right message boards cling to the screenshots of newspaper headlines in much the same way parents of alleged changelings clung to discarded eggshells to identify evil. They are rituals meant to alleviate unrelated stress and anxiety.

While we have started to make some headway in combatting this distorted way of thinking, there is no magic bullet. Debunking campaigns and education efforts may be effective as a form of prevention, but conspiracy theories are generally hard to combat once they have become firmly entrenched within an individual’s mindset. We still understand so little about people's susceptibility to conspiracy theories over time. Some research suggests that improving people’s material well-being is one of the best ways to combat them, which means that conspiracy theorists will require robust support networks to change their behavior.

If we want to mitigate conspiratorial thinking, we need to recognize that this is not a conservative anomaly but a modern iteration of an ancient impulse. No one is immune to it, and unless we start developing some social tools to combat it, the specter of clones and doppelgängers will continue to haunt us for years to come.

Alex Has Opinions 2/19/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/19/21

Beware the Privilege of Demanding an Explanation

The entitlement in requiring that people answer you

Years ago, I was temping at a racial justice nonprofit. I was helping to staff their annual conference on the social determinants of health when a middle-aged white man darted straight towards our table, which was set up in a convention center of a trendy hotel chain. He swung his arms wildly from side to side as he walked up to us and immediately addressed the woman sitting next to me—a Black woman in her early thirties who was a full-time employee for the nonprofit.

“Excuse me, where is the lobbying meeting taking place for the pediatric conference,” he asked abruptly.

For context, that was not our conference, which he would have known if he had bothered to read the large sign draped from our table. The person he was addressing was one of the nonprofit's fellows. She was there to help oversee the speakers for the conference, and at that moment, was taking a short breather at my booth. She had no idea what was going on on the convention center floor because it wasn't her job.

“I am afraid I don’t know, sir,” she responded with all the politeness she could muster at that moment.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he shot back cooly.

“Sorry, sir. I’m afraid you are at the wrong conference,” I interjected.

“Oh, forget it,” he said before storming off.

The fellow then turned to me, a white person in my young twenties, and said: “Be sure to never be like that.” And I nodded, not knowing what else to say.

I see many privileged people, particularly privileged white people, act like that older man a lot. They demand that people tell them the information they want when they want it, regardless of whether it's convenient for the person they are asking. It’s an expectation so ingrained in them that they don’t even realize that demanding an explanation is not something they are entitled to.

If you are like many people, your first response to this article (maybe even your first response to the title) will be to question the premise. “Isn’t learning a good thing?” you might ask. “Shouldn’t I educate myself about things I do not understand?” And, of course, the answer to all of these questions is yes; you should continue to learn about subjects you do not understand, especially uncomfortable topics such as racism, sexism, and other aspects of bigotry.

The problem is that a large subset of people will assume that because you have a position they do not understand or agree with, you must be willing to explain it to them, usually right there and then. This request is at the center of the online “debate me” culture. It’s common to see men such as Dave Ruben demand that people they disagree with come onto their platform to discuss their objections. If the person refuses, these pundits will label that person a coward. For example, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy implied that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a frightened child because she refused to debate him.

There are countless reasons, though, why someone might not engage with a person in a debate. These causes range from the personal to the political. Maybe they don’t have the time or energy to engage with you at that moment. Maybe they are dealing with an unrelated personal crisis. Maybe they just don’t feel like it. Even if you have the perfect counter to their argument, it’s unreasonable to assume that you are entitled to that person’s time. Dialogue is supposed to be a two-way street. If someone doesn’t want to talk to you, they do not have to, and vice versa.

This issue of “debate me” culture is further complicated because when someone points out behavior that hurts them, the accused tends to get defensive. People sometimes conflate their feelings of guilt and shame over being called out with their feelings of being hurt. They will demand that their victims explain themselves for this imaginary injustice, which leads to a situation where victims have to rationalize their pain to those who have harmed them. As an antiracist educator, Nora Samaran wrote in her fantastic essay about how privileged white people sometimes react negatively when learning about the hard truths of racism and colonialism:

“…we expect that it is somehow normal that we can go on the attack, and expect the people experiencing harm to coddle and apologize to us, rather than being responsible for our own feelings and making ourselves accessible and available to finally come to hear and see things that are happening every day to human beings all around us that our privilege lets us ignore.”

Unsurprisingly, people who hold a marginalized identity stumble into this problem a lot. The mere articulation of their boundaries, and in some cases their very identities, triggers defensiveness. There are countless stories of people telling someone more privileged than them about their reality, only for that story to lead to hostility from the listener. It’s not uncommon for a simple conversation about a trans person’s pronouns to devolve into a “debate” over whether their identity is even valid, or for a Black person’s description of racism they have personally experienced to be used to depict them as difficult, unreasonable, or even racist.

This brittleness translates into marginalized groups often having to do a lot of emotional management. Many marginalized people end up suppressing their own feelings to assuage the egos of “debaters” who cannot recognize the harm they inflict upon others. Many debaters think they are operating in good faith, but really they are dumping their unprocessed feelings about a subject onto a person under the guise of a discussion. A description of a person’s own identity becomes interpreted as a “why won’t you debate me” or “explain this to me,” which depending on the subject matter being discussed, can be exhausting to explain or even downright offensive. In the words of Parker Marie Molloy for Slate about asking questions of trans people:

“While these issues may be very new and interesting to you, the process of explaining them may be exhausting to the trans person you’re asking if they’ve been asked to, in effect, explain themselves 100 times before.”

This reality is why the phrase “Google It” has emerged in activist circles. It’s not because people don’t want you to learn about these issues, but because many are tired of being expected to explain things to someone merely because their opinions or existence makes that person uncomfortable. It’s work many marginalized people are expected to do by default, regardless of their circumstances, and it’s not something a lot of them want to do anymore (and truthfully, never really wanted to do in the first place). However, many privileged people are so used to taking advantage of that forced hospitality that they don’t realize how intrusive their calls for an explanation can be.

Some people have expressly signed up to do that labor — i.e., activists, therapists, educators, etc. — but these people usually are getting paid for their work or willingly donating their time to do it. Just as you wouldn’t go up to a scientist and demand that they explain quantum mechanics to you because you find the subject matter confusing, it’s not fair to demand that a transgender person explain their identity simply because you don’t understand how pronouns work. There is a time and a place for everything, and asking a stranger to justify their existence is not it. Seek out the people who want to do that work, preferably the ones who are getting paid for it.

Sadly, even here, it's not so simple. This situation is further compounded by the fact that not every person who asks for this information is doing so in good faith. Some people have weaponized their privilege to railroad conversations and sabotage movements.

Most people who demand an explanation are not doing so maliciously. This obliviousness doesn’t mean the harm they cause is nonexistent, but it’s generally not intentional. The debate rages on whether that even matters. However, we will sidestep that conversation, for now, to talk about how there is an entire subset of people who do mean to inflict harm. That’s what a “troll” is — someone who purposefully tries to upset people on the Internet — and not all of them are overtly offensive.

Some trolls will use the pretext of wanting to learn more as a way to attack others. For example, the tactic of “sealioning” (a word based on a Wondermark comic) is when a commentator pretends to engage in “good faith” questioning, only to wear their interlocutor down with inane or offensive questions. As Amy Johnson wrote in Harmful Speech Online: “Sealioning is an intentional, combative performance of cluelessness. Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning — often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points — with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate.”

Imagine a six-year-old asking the question “why” over and over again to annoy you, but instead, they are a 34-year old man questioning the validity of your pain. The point isn’t to be informed, but rather to steal away your attention — to make you feel tired and to question your sanity.

Sometimes these trolls can seem sincere in their line of questioning too. There is an entire subset of people called “concern trolls” who pretend to care about a user’s point only to undermine that position secretly. The textbook example of this was in 2006 when a staffer for Republican Charlie Bass created a sock puppet (i.e., a fake account) on a progressive-leaning site to foster distrust in his opponent Democrat Paul Hodes. Blogger Laura Clawson, who co-ran the blog the aid concern trolled on, ultimately deciphered the ruse, leading to the staffer’s resignation. She commented to the press, saying:

“You see this all the time on political blogs, some elaborate act where someone says, ‘Now, I hate to say something against a Democrat, but.’So you develop an eye for it. And this poster definitely tripped all the wires.”

These interactions occurred online, but it’s possible to sealion and concern troll people in real life. For example, Markos Moulitsas wrote in The Hill in 2008 about how then-House Minority Leader John Boehner concern trolled when he claimed that Democrats “miscalculated” over their support of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Amanda Marcotte likewise cautioned Democrats in 2018 not to listen to “concern trolls,” belittling their concerns about Donald Trump’s presidency. Although these tactics are not as easy to use in real life as on a keyboard, it’s definitely possible to lie and manipulate others under the pretext of concern and education.

Now, as a reasonable person, you might not use either of these tactics intentionally. Still, there’s no real accurate way for your interlocutor to know that, especially online, where anonymity eats away at the presentation of good faith. As the YouTuber, Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints fame remarked in her video Canceling about commentators harassing her due to her perceived support of adult film actor and alleged enbyphobe Buck Angel: “How can you tell the difference between a trans-anarcho-socialist with an anime avatar and a nazi pretending to be a trans-anarcho-socialist with an anime avatar? Well, you can’t. Anonymous is anonymous is anonymous. ”

Modern discourse has become so toxic that it’s difficult to tell the difference between an earnest question and an abusive one. There are plenty of commentators who receive so much negative attention that it has closed them off from even the vaguest hint of distrust. That context exists in the background of every conversation, both online and off, especially for marginalized people, and it's one you should be cognizant of before asking a question that might be easily Googleable.

Furthermore, even if a person's questions are in good faith, that doesn’t make their line of questioning any less offensive. As any marginalized person who has had to deal with invasive questioning about their identity can attest to, someone can be genuinely offensive. You can ask and say hurtful things without trying to engage in a duplicitous, bad faith campaign. You can even engage in techniques such as concern trolling or sealioning without being directly conscious of them. A lot of people unload their baggage onto others because they can.

For your conversation to not be viewed as exploitative, it's not enough for you to want to come in good faith. Your questions need to be grounded in consent and mutual respect, or your partner will not believe you.

Those many years ago, the older man who came up to my coworker was most likely not trying to ruin her day. He probably didn’t care about her either way. He had a question he wanted to know the answer to and used her to get that information — used being the operative word. He didn’t treat her with the respect that a person deserves. He saw her as a receptacle of information that he felt entitled to, and that’s not how any conversation should work.

It may sound obvious to some, but it sadly bears repeating: a good conversation must be grounded in consent. Your partner must want to talk to you.

Do you ask the people in your life if it's okay to proceed with a type of questioning or conversation before talking about it?

Have you presented yourself as someone open to criticism?

Are your conversations a give-and-take where you listen to your partner's concerns as well?

You’ll know by the silences in your life if the answer to the above questions is no. Far too many people do none of these things. They spew all of their unprocessed anxiety and rage upon their partners in a seemingly unending, one-sided monologue. They treat their interlocutors as empty vessels, worthy of neither humanity nor respect, and give them nothing in return.

There is a privilege in demanding an explanation. It is a selfish state of affairs built on silence, and many of us need to stop and listen to the quiet trauma we have caused, seething at a whisper.

Alex Has Opinions 2/17/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/17/21

The Construction of a Queer, Gaming Utopia

An inclusive, queer, leftist scene is just one click away.

Ona typical day, the server is abuzz with activity. Gamers are sharing their favorite memes and songs, coordinating sessions, and promoting their Twitch streams. The discord server is dedicated to over twenty games and counting, and most of the players are queer, so much that there is a macro in one of the introduction rooms reading “React below if you’re some kind of straight (unfortunately).”

The gaming scene has never been the most inclusive space, which is what makes this queer server so refreshing. In between scheduling for pathfinder games, there is a macro that lets players choose their pronouns. There is an entire channel dedicated to sharing bathroom selfies where nerds of all persuasions can brag about their cool, nerdy swag. With a few simple clicks, these gamers have solved a problem pervasive in the industry for decades, and their solutions are ones anyone can adopt.

This server's story begins years earlier with Dragonfire, a cooperative card game with a heavy Dungeons & Dragon aesthetic requiring around five or six people to play. The couple Jake and Wyatt (whose names, like all names in this article, have been changed to protect their privacy) traveled to meet a friend in Boston, and while there, they played Dragonfire for the first time. Jake and Wyatt liked it so much that they decided to host regular sessions back at their Maryland apartment.

One day they didn’t have enough players, so Jake started to use gay social dating apps to promote their gaming sessions. “So Jake,” recalls Wyatt, “got on Grindr and started, you know, finding nerdy people and inviting them over to play.” Queer people have long used dating apps to build out robust social scenes, and Jake and Wyatt quickly discovered that the allure of genuine connection trumped a sexual one in many cases. “We got a surprising amount of people,” continues Wyatt, “who said I don’t care if there is sex, yeah I’ll come to play Dragonfire with you guys.”

Soon people were driving down to play Dragonfire every Friday night. Some regularly came from several states over to make the trip. Jake and Wyatt's apartment became a nexus of activity. Some nights two or three sessions of Dragonfire would occur simultaneously, and not everyone who attended played. Others would socialize as they watched their nerdy peers play rogues and wizards well into the night — happy to be in a space that accepted them. People would often stay over into the next morning or even the entire weekend.

When the pandemic hit, there was a fear among participants that this space would die like with so many other things. These events had always required a fair bit of organization to coordinate. Still, the group had fortunately relied on Facebook Messenger as their de facto communication tool for nearly half a decade. There was no need to transition online because everyone was already there. Wyatt knew how to organize digitally. For years, he had been involved in online spaces such as World of Warcraft as a guild officer. He and his friend Henry set up a discord server to better interface with Tabletop Simulator — a digital interface that lets you play tabletop games online. Weekly Dragonfire nights continued as they had before, albeit a little further apart.

The discord's evolution from a Dragonfire-only server to one dedicated to over 20 games started with a conversation Wyatt had with his friend Stuart. Stuart was frustrated with the gaming scene. He was annoyed not just because of the blanket homophobia common in online chats and forums but also because of the lack of resources within the queer gaming scene. A lot of the queer-only servers he found were either defunct, or they felt impersonal and toxic. As Wyatt remarked to me later: “You can join…all queer guilds or whatever, you know… sometimes they can still be shitty for other reasons. [They can be] douchebags like any other regular douchebag. You know, being vitriolic to people who make mistakes and things like that.” Stuart wanted a space online that didn’t feel like a queerified-version of the toxic straight spaces he had left.

In Wyatt’s mind, he had the solution. The discord server already existed: why not expand it?

After getting the Dragonfire group's permission, he worked with his friend Henry, a longtime ally and Dragonfire player, to grow it out. Some of this involved setting up the infrastructure with easy-to-use macros, but mostly it was about spreading the word to the large community of leftist, queer nerds they had already built. They added not only people from the Dragonfire group but also people from Wyatt’s World of Warcraft days, friends of his partner Jake, and of course, one or two people they have met off Grindr and other queer dating apps.

The server now encompasses groups ranging from Animal Crossing to League of Legends to Borderlands 3. It continues to evolve with little of the harassment and abuse typical of the gaming scene. It’s just as normal to see players there to reassure each other after a bad day of work as it is for them to talk about the games they love. “Thanks for all the memes,” types one user, “I feel better now than I did!”

Much of this empathy has to do with the intentionality Wyatt, Jake, and Henry have put into the server's development. They built up a community, not just a product. A safe space that’s rare within the LGBTQIA+ gaming scene, and if we are honest, the gaming scene in general.

The larger gaming community has been struggling with issues of harassment for decades with mixed success. A recent study from the Anti-Defamation League found that 65% of players have experienced severe harassment while playing games online, including physical threats, stalking, and sustained harassment. Many of these players claim they were targeted for their identity — the LGBTQIA+ community being one the highest self-reported groups. “In Overwatch,” remarks one player in the study, “I’ve seen hateful players call others gay slurs and tell them to kill themselves many times. I always report it but rarely feel like I’m taken seriously.”

There have been many attempts to solve this problem, but these solutions have predominantly been technocratic and piecemeal. Companies will often attempt to tweak the interface of a game or put out PSA’s and not really address the underlying issue, which is that these instances of harassment are not isolated instances. Discrimination is not an ancillary component of their games but one systemic to their industry and their user base.

For example, Riot Games, the maker of the arena battle game League of Legends, has been researching this topic for years. Their findings provide a far more complex understanding of harassment. They have found that their consistently toxic players make a fraction of their platform’s overall toxicity— in essence, disproving the “don’t feed the trolls” argument that has been so prevalent on the Internet. As Jeffrey Lin, scientist and game designer, remarked of their research for the company: “The vast majority [of harrasment] was from the average person just having a bad day.”

A lot of bigotry online is perpetuated by people who do not consider themselves discriminatory or bigoted. Their hurtful language comes out when they are frustrated or upset and is not part of a targeted campaign to harass or dox a player. As Wyatt says of homophobia in particular: “I don't think people realize you can be homophobic or transphobic or whatever by accident…A lot of people get very defensive, and it can be hard to find a group of people, who [aren’t] just surface-level not homophobic, but actually not homophobic.”

It’s that subtle bigotry that lies at the heart of most online discrimination, and most companies are not willing to address it. Going back to the example of Riot Games, in response to their research on harassment, they initially set up a volunteer tribunal system that allowed players to review and judge reported violations from other players anonymously. They then issued ‘reform cards’ that allowed punished players to understand why their accounts might be suspended in the first place. This review process was meant to encourage community buy-in, and it appears to have had some initial results, with informed players having a reported decrease in destructive behavior.

However, Riot Game was not willing to commit these resources indefinitely. The turnaround for reviews from volunteers was not as quick as they preferred, so they opted for a more “efficient” AI that automatically made judgments. The tribunal system was disbanded, and that stinginess impacted their community. As one user remarked on the League of Legends fandom page: “I miss the Tribunal. Power aside, it really helped me become a less-toxic player. I’ve felt the Dark Side creep up on me further and further since then.”

The issue of harassment remains for League of Legends. A 2020 survey reported that 98% of players had experienced harassment within the game. The company Riot Games has also been reported to have a very toxic workplace, paying out a $10 million gender discrimination lawsuit in 2019. Their issue of harassment was not ancillary to their community but struck at the core of how they operated as a business.

We see here how has it’s not enough to claim that you are concerned by harassment. You have to be willing to form a community centered on accountability. As Wyatt and Jake have proven, there is no technocratic solution to doing this — the answer comes from open-communication, hard work, and empathy.

If the world of gaming wants to create spaces that provide genuine acceptance — and not just on the surface — they need to create intentional communities that are actually dismantling players’ bigotry. Whether they be players, discord members, or forum commentators, this goal requires that community members have actual buy-in. Passive members are one bad day away from taking out their anger and frustration on players they do not know.

Most importantly, community leaders need to be willing to fund these spaces with time and resources. Riot Games’ tribunal system was a great idea, but its decision to shutter it for a more “efficient” (i.e., cheaper) AI system was a step in the wrong direction. The anonymity of the Internet means that non-toxic systems require work to create social norms that foster trust. You cannot expect that a small policy tweak will do away with decades of player harassment.

The good news is that people want those spaces, and many are already actively building them. These include larger actors such as activist Anita Sarkeesian (who just recently created a game and online harassment hotline) as well as small-time people like Wyatt and Jake — energetic, queer gamers who built a community simply because they thought one was needed — and maybe, even people like you.

With enough work and time, a queer gaming utopia is just a few clicks away.

Alex Has Opinions 2/10/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/10/21

The Conservative Obsession with Political Correctness

Conservatives also love PC Culture and it’s dangerous.

For decades now, there has been a frustrating conversation around the concept of political correctness. The narrative that we hear repeatedly is that certain Americans, usually liberals and leftists, are trying to censor what the rest of us say in our day-to-day lives. Those arguing against political correctness claim that “liberals” want to track our language for implicit biases and microaggressions and cancel us if we say or do anything wrong.

There have been a string of studies, articles, and exposes claiming that Americans hate political correctness. It seems to be one of the few things that many people agree on both the right and the left. “Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture,” goes the title of an article by Yascha Mounk in 2018 for The Atlantic. “Bill Maher on the perils of political correctness” begins another article by David Marchese in The New York Times.

This branding, however, belies the fact that political correctness is not an exclusively leftist concept. It’s a term with a complicated history that has changed dramatically over the centuries. Yet, even if we were to accept its more modern definition, it’s not something done by the Left alone. Nearly every political ideology adheres to it, and conservativism is by far the biggest offender.

Conservativism is an umbrella term describing a general reverence for social traditions and institutions. It is an ideology that encompasses many different types of people (e.g., Christian fundamentalists, pro-business globalists, libertarians, war hawks, white ethnonationalists, etc.), and unsurprisingly, there is no universal agreement among them or even really a clearcut divide between these groups. For example, while the 48th Vice President of the United States Mike Pence was fervently religious, 45th President Donald Trump was decidedly less so, secretly mocking religious believers while in office. Yet, they both served side-by-side.

Despite some noticeable differences, some unifying norms bring these disparate camps together. Specifically, they all hate similar types of things. The most obvious is a disdain for multiculturalism. Whether it's former president Donald Trump calling Mexicans ‘drug dealers, criminals, [and] rapists’ or the fact that nearly half of all Republicans are bothered by hearing a foreign language spoken in public, conservatives are not the best at incorporating other cultural strands into the American tapestry. Many of them even tend to get angry and offended when these new traditions threaten their hegemony.

In recent years one of the easiest ways to trigger a religious conservative in America was to use the more inclusive phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Ever since former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly promoted the book ‘The War on Christmas’ by John Gibson in 2005, the season's greeting has become a sort of shorthand over what conservatives perceive to be a larger cultural battle against Christianity. “Do you remember they were trying to take ‘Christmas’ out of Christmas?,” Trump remarked to a crowd in 2019. “Do you remember? They didn’t want to let you say ‘Merry Christmas.”

To be clear, there is no compelling evidence that such persecution has occurred. The majority of the US population is Christian, approximately 65% according to a 2019 Pew Research report. The majority of our political leaders in Congress are Christian as well. Most people continue to use the phrase Merry Christmas without incident, including former Democratic President Barack Obama.

The War on Christmas has less to do with reality and more about entitlement. Many conservatives are angry that their traditions are being challenged by what they perceive to be foreign influences. As conservative commentator Dennis Prager wrote for the National Review in 2015: “Of course it’s a war on Christianity — or, more precisely, a war on the religious nature of America.” Prager here is conflating Christiandom with America itself — a definition that implies that all other denominations are invalid.

We see this disdain of otherness reflected not only in the holiday debates over Christmas cards and Starbucks cups but also in the regular xenophobia and racism expressed by many conservatives both inside and out of the Republican Party. Trump grew to prominence partly by advocating the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was a secret Muslim — something that would only be “controversial” if you found the very idea of non-Christianity offensive. A more recent example includes conservatives being angry that House rules were amended so congresswoman Ilhan Omar could wear her hijab on the House floor. These conservatives were enraged, not by another religion, but by the perceived otherness. As triggered pastor E.W. Jackson said in response to the rule change:

“We are a Judeo-Christian country. We are a nation rooted and grounded in Christianity, and that’s that. And anybody that doesn’t like that, go live somewhere else. It’s very simple. Just go live somewhere else. Don’t try to change our country into some sort of Islamic republic or try to base our country on sharia law.”

The mere inclusion of a non-dominant identity was enough to send this conservative snowflake into a tailspin, and it’s important to note that this hatred of multiculturalism has never been an exclusively American phenomenon. Far-right leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, or Benjamin Netanyahu have consistently expressed utter disdain for all people outside their chosen group. “Indians are undoubtedly changing … They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us,” Bolsonaro remarked of indigenous people on a recent Facebook broadcast. We could spend this entire article; hell, we could make a series of books, simply chronicling the xenophobia and racism that drives conservative movements across the globe.

This hatred doesn’t pertain to a particular religion or political party. Some conservative figures, such as white supremacist Richard Spencer, aren’t even very religious. Nor are all conservatives united in a shared hatred of the same group. Conservative hatred tends to evolve over time. Benjamin Franklin was concerned about German immigrants diluting America's whiteness, and yet today, a white ethnonationalist would hardly be concerned by someone’s German heritage. Likewise, pro-business Republicans are not as upset with immigrants, as they are “socialist” influences seeking to reform capitalism. A key part of conservative political correctness is not about a specific ideology or group but rather about expressing your contempt for that ever-shifting other.

Unlike leftists or liberals, however, conservatives typically hold a lot more power overall, and so that disdain can translate into outright supremacist policy. Mike Pence was not simply triggered by members of the LGBTQIA+ community but advocated for a religious “freedom” law, which allowed people to discriminate against queer people under the lie of religious tolerance. Donald Trump did not only rant about Obama being a secret Muslim but, among many other things, signed an executive order that banned foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries from coming to the United States. A dangerous part about conservative political correctness is that it does not stop and ends with words. That judgment translates into policies that hurt other people.

And once conservatives decide an authority or law is necessary, it can be decades or centuries before they are willing to let go.

Another element that tends to trigger conservatives is anytime there is a challenge to power they respect, running the gamut from institutions like the police or military to symbols like a nation’s flag. Conservatives do not like it when people question these traditional power structures, even if those criticisms are grounded in facts and histories that are valid.

In America, we have seen this issue frequently unfold with the national anthem. The most prominent example in recent years was when former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem to protest black Americans' mistreatment. Many conservatives were enraged by what they considered to be an act of disrespect. As triggered conservative Marc A. Thiessen wrote of his hurt feelings in the Washington Post:

“When players disrespect the flag, they disrespect that sacrifice. And it would not matter if they had done so to protest Donald Trump or Barack Obama — their actions would be equally offensive.”

This tension over the anthem has a history well over a hundred years old. As early as 1892, a Black congregation at the Bethel African Methodist Church refused to sing ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ (one of the de facto national anthems at the time)’ to protest, among many things, the recent People’s Grocery lynchings, which had led to the loss of several Black Americans detained in police custody. “I don’t want to sing that song until this country is what it claims to be, sweet land of liberty,” remarked one man, according to the Decatur Herald. The article was quick to reassure readers they joined “heartily” in singing the abolitionist song “John Brown” instead.

These protests over symbols of American patriotism have been a very heated part of the discourse. Some have even become a vital part of legal precedent. For example, the decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis declared that schools had a right to compel students to salute the flag. Some of the legal arguments are quite similar to the ones Thiessen made eighty-something years later, the majority writing:

“To stigmatize legislative judgment in providing for this universal gesture of respect for the symbol of our national life in the setting of the common school as a lawless inroad on that freedom of conscience which the Constitution protects, would amount to no less than the pronouncement of pedagogical and psychological dogma in a field where courts possess no marked and certainly no controlling competence.”

In essence, the Court believed that the promotion of national unity was a good in of itself. Yet, the Court did not believe it had the right to intervene in how state legislatures and local municipalities decided to promote that sense of national unity — in this case, children saluting the flag every morning.

Even though this decision would eventually be overturned several years later in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the argument that we must pay deference to national authority would come up time and time again throughout public life. We see it in the way conservatives have advocated for blanket respect for police officers, the military, and all the other authorities they deem sacred, even to the point of threatening those who refuse to surrender that respect. Former Attorney General William Barr, for example, infamously remarked: “[that Americans] have to start showing more [respect] than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. If communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”

Unsurprisingly, this is not a uniquely American experience. Conservatives all over the world caution deference when describing institutions of authority. For example, in France, police protested en masse when the government attempted to implement anti-racism reforms within the national police force. The police alleged that part of these protests had to do with high suicide rates and lack of resources, but it was clear that disrespect was also a huge sticking point. As union official Eric Defremont stated of the protests: “It’s about the lack of respect for us. Yes, there’s a malaise in the police. They don’t even give us the proper tools. Nobody in France tells their children, ‘I want you to be a police officer.’ We just want to be respected.”

From conservative British people insisting on toasting to the queen to billionaire Elon Musk’s rabid fanbase, if you are a conservative, then chances are you will be triggered when someone inevitability challenges an authority that you respect. This blind deference, however, can be problematic because not all of these institutions are universally good. For example, many police departments have been plagued with systemic racism, especially in America and France, where study after study has shown biases in both countries.

When your worldview prevents you from critically examining traditional power structures, then it makes it very difficult for you to do the work necessary to reform or roll them back. This political correctness results in a lot of obstructionism as conservatives refuse to critically examine broken institutions.

Conservatives often lambast liberals and leftists for political correctness, but as we have seen, there are several areas where they are quite vocal about their norms being violated.

Conservatives generally get very upset when people attempt to change what they perceive to be the dominant culture. This shift can be as trivial as a season’s greeting or as significant as what types of people are admitted into Congress. These hatreds are inevitably intermixed with a person’s xenophobia, racism, and bigotry. The other may change from person-to-person and era-to-era, but the contempt for multiculturalism remains the same.

Conservatives also get triggered over what they perceive as disrespect for institutions of authority they care about. That respected authority can change depending on the person, place, and era we are referring to. For some, it's the monarchy. For others, it's the wealthy businessman who has amassed billionaires of dollars in rightfully earned wealth. You can tell you have found the right person from all the hurt conservative feelings.

Your local strain of conservatism might have more triggers as well. American conservatism, for example, tends to be very individualistic. It’s the reason why putting on a mask during the Coronavirus pandemic was so difficult for many here, but go over to Japan, which also has a conservative government, and mask-wearing was not much of an issue.

‘Disdain for the other’ and ‘outrage over disrespect’ are two aspects universally applicable to conservative movements. Still, they are by no means the only things to trigger conservatives — for that, we would need a much longer article.

Alex Has Opinions 2/1/21 Alex Has Opinions 2/1/21

Moderates Should Want to Abolish the Filibuster the Most

The filibuster makes reasoned debate impossible.

The filibuster is a Senate tactic where one or more Senators block legislation through “unlimited debate.” They do not yield their time and effectively kill the legislation by not letting it advance to a vote. The only way to prevent this obstruction is to end debate through a procedure known as “cloture,” which requires a three-fifths majority (currently 60 votes) — a virtual impossibility in our modern political climate.

The filibuster is one reason that legislation with the support of a simple majority is rarely passed anymore, which has caused a fair amount of consternation on all sides of the political spectrum. A lot of ink has been spilled on why progressives and conservatives should abolish the filibuster, and as someone on the Left, I certainly see the appeal in some of these arguments more than others.

Yet not nearly enough effort has been placed into making the moderate case for abolishing the filibuster, which is a shame because moderates have just as much a reason to want this archaic procedure gone as anyone else. When you really dive into the nitty-gritty of how this procedure operates in the real world, it's hard not to view it as a barrier to efficient and responsible governance.

It Was An Accident

When we talk about the filibuster, there is this widely held misconception that it was an intentional product of the Founding Father’s grand plan. We see this sentiment, for example, reflected in an article David Shuster penned in 2005 for NBC News, writing:

“…[filibusters go] all the way back to our Founding Fathers. To break a log jam at the Constitutional Convention, their compromise was this: The House of Representatives would be the popular body representing the will of the people, while the Senate, as the deliberative body, would protect small states and minority views”

Yet, this assumption could not be further from the truth. The House of Representatives and the Senate used to have very similar procedures, including the House’s “previous question” motion, which currently allows a simple majority to end debate. This motion had been copied over from the British parliament, but American representatives at the time didn’t really use it to end debate like they do in the House today.

To simplify Senate procedure, Vice President Aaron Burr removed the previous question motion in 1805. People were not aware of the ramifications because the country was relatively new, and lawmakers were still experimenting with how the rules work. The previous question motion would not be used to terminate debate in the House until several years later in 1811 (and would only be added permanently to the rules in 1840). Still, by then, it was gone in the Senate, and there was no serious vehicle to replace it.

The door was open for any disgruntled lawmaker to disrupt proceedings. The first filibuster happened in 1837 when Whig Senators tried to stop Andrew Jackson's allies from erasing or “expunging” a resolution of censure against the President. The Whigs were ultimately unsuccessful in this endeavor, but the filibuster remained, popping up now and again from issues ranging from a charter for a national bank to civil rights legislation. Despite multiple attempts to reform it in the 19th century, the majority was never successful in passing it for the same reason as today — the minority threatened to filibuster it.

We probably would still have no cloture procedure whatsoever if it had not been framed as a “war measure” in 1917. After a group of Senators used the procedure to obstruct President Woodrow Wilson’s effort to arm merchant ships, the President demanded reform, labeling the obstructionists “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own.” We were in the midst of World War 1, and the public was enraged that a few Senators could block a measure framed as vital to the country's safety.

Even with widespread support, negotiations to curb the filibuster's influence were difficult because the filibuster acted as the ultimate bargaining chip. Since one Republican Senator supported a supermajority to enact cloture, the Senate ended up adopting a high two-thirds majority in March of 1917, so they could get assurances from Senators in the opposition not to block the proposal. The filibuster would later be amended again in 1975 to three-fifths (where it currently sits today), but support for bringing it down to a simple majority like in the House have always stalled: the minority enjoys the luxury of being able to nuke popular legislation too much.

In the last century, we have seen the filibuster be used as a radical tool of obstructionism. The Senate's political minority has adopted it to prevent votes on anti-lynching legislation (something that has still not been passed), civil rights legislation, and legislation meant to block workplace discrimination. To this day, the record for the longest filibuster goes to segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in his attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In the words of David Litt for The Atlantic:

“Today, the filibuster continues to hold back progress on civil rights. Because the chamber’s two-senators-per-state structure favors smaller-population rural states, disproportionately white states have disproportionate power in the Senate.”

Many moderates have claimed that the filibuster engenders pragmatic discussion, but it has acted more as a regressive tool than one of reasoned debate. There is nothing pragmatic about preserving what effectively is a glorified typo that has prevented over a century of sound legislation.

Kills Genuine Compromise

Even knowing this history, people's instinctual argument in favor of the filibuster is to ask what happens when “your side” loses. If Republicans or Democrats win office in the next election cycle, won’t that make “your side” vulnerable to undesirable legislation? It’s all well and good to press your political advantage when you have it, but the situation becomes dicer admittedly when you are in the minority. As Aaron Blake writes in The Washington Post:

“The 2022 elections also loom large: They could well install Republicans back in control of the Senate and the House. Midterms are generally very tough on a president’s party, and Republicans need only the most modest of gains to take back both chambers.”

However, the whole point of being a moderate is that you allegedly do not fall prey to tribalism on either the left or the right. Moderates are supposed to weigh the merits on all sides of the ideological spectrum and advocate for commonsense initiatives that make sense both politically and financially. They claim to want a substantive debate, something the filibuster fails to provide at nearly every turn.

Think about what the filibuster practically means. Regardless of how radical or self-serving a Senator’s viewpoints are, that one person can delay the proceedings for the entire chamber. For example, Senator Huey Long infamously filibustered for over 15 hours, where he read the constitution, lambasted colleagues, and gave out his recipe for fried oysters. Although he was trying to ensure Senate confirmation remained for some New Deal employees, his protest's main objective was to prevent political enemies in Louisiana from obtaining those jobs. Huey Long was able to take advantage of this archaic practice to temporarily halt negotiations from happening just to spite a political rival.

This history is not ancillary to the filibuster but ties directly into what the word means. The word filibuster's entomology has origins to the buccaneers of the 17th century, most likely the Dutch word vrijbuiter or freebooter. This word was adapted into French (“flibustier”), Spanish (“filibustero”), and eventually English. It’s not hard to see how a metaphorical throughline can be traced between men stealing gold on the open waters and the men hijacking a government's political proceedings.

Filibustering was not a term of pride crafted by the Founding Fathers but a pejorative. We gain nothing pretending otherwise. Many moderates claim to have a desire to incorporate the thoughts and views of both the minority and majority into legislation via compromise, and yet letting one actor consistently stall negotiations entirely is not how proper debate should work. The filibuster prevents genuine compromise from happening because it lets more fringe positions control our entire political conversation.

For better or worse, most of this country prescribes to policies that are closer to the political center, and their leaders reflect those preferences. The Democratic party is not filled with a legion of Bernie Sanders lookalikes waiting to implement singer payer healthcare. It’s composed of conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin, Dianne Feinstein, and Kyrsten Sinema. Moderates should want a political system that reflects the world those leaders would build. There are plenty of Senate Democrats who would be more than willing to come together with Senate Republicans to pass policy. “They know we all have to work together,” remarked Joe Manchin of the Republican Party to NBC News.

However, that ideal remains out of reach if Congress continues to let opportunistic people preside over a tyranny of the minority.

Encourages Bloat

Another core problem with the filibuster is that it encourages large, unwieldy legislation. Since it mandates that you need a supermajority to squash any dissent at any time, our leaders often scramble to dump everything into the one or two bills that have a chance of actually getting passed.

These pieces of legislation are called “Omnibus” bills (they can also be broken up into several smaller ones referred to as “minibus” bills). These are appropriation bills that only require a single vote to pass the floor, but they wrap hundreds of measures together into a single package. Omnibus bills have become a necessity in an age where the threat of filibuster is the defacto tool of negotiation. The need to enact cloture (the procedure used to end a filibuster) has gone from something that occurs several times a congressional term to over one hundred. Less substantive legislation is making it through the pipeline, which means omnibus bills tend to get very long and enigmatic.

For example, the 2019 minibus bills totaled over 2,300 pages and were passed while many Americans were on Christmas break. Most legislators did not fully comprehend the substance of the laws they had passed. The sheer scope of these bills was too much to process, and these bills were not a one-off experience in Congress. The appropriations process has created a situation where legislators routinely remark on their inability to debate (or even read) everything within an omnibus bill. “How fast can you read? Can you read 2,232 pages in only 18 hours?” begins an article in GovTrack, “If you can’t, then you’re like most members of Congress and nearly every other human being.”

Furthermore, since these are laws spearheaded by the majority party, the minority routinely has little influence on their overall direction, especially when the President and the Senate belong to the same party. The negotiation becomes one between whoever controls a filibuster-proof majority and the President, with their power to veto legislation. As the Center for Effective Government remarked on the omnibus negations for the 2004 Congressional Term:

“…the minority party has not been privy to the discussions of compromise for the omnibus bill. In fact, balance of power has shifted to the executive branch, leaving compromises between the President and his party.”

This lack of accountability creates a situation where the public is routinely oblivious to the details of Congress’s most important legislation until well after the fact (if ever), which creates an environment ripe for abuse. Omnibus bills are routinely criticized as legislation having too much pork (i.e., earmarks that benefit special interests or donors in a congressperson’s districts). In between the 2017 and 2019 Congressional terms, the group OpenTheBooks, an admittedly conservative organization, reported hundreds of millions of dollars going to Fortune 100 companies such as General Electric, Boeing Corp, and United Technologies. The Ivy Leagues similarly received over $9 billion in federal grants during this time.

While some of this money is being allocated for the common good, the lack of transparency in the omnibus process makes it very difficult to assess where that good starts and the corruption ends. The byzantine nature of appropriations is the perfect target for lobbyists, who are infamous for killing reforms in between the lines of an appropriation bill few will ever fully read. During the 2019 appropriation omnibus, for example, the health care industry successfully killed an attempt to curtail “surprise” medical bills — something it’s doubt the public would have agreed with if the issue had been debated in the public eye.

A common talking point we hear from moderates is that they want more straightforward, realistic leadership. “Pragmatism has never been more urgently needed in American politics,” writes David Von Drehle in the Washington Post. Efficiency is certainly a noble goal, but one not possible when the filibuster acts as a cover for disingenuous legislation.

Discourages Honesty

Lastly, the filibuster encourages politicians to back legislation they don’t genuinely support. The barrier for a law’s passage is so high that most politicians can vote on a bill they know will ultimately not pass in the Senate to signal to their constituents that they support an issue, even when they don’t really believe in it.

The debate over Medicare for All or single-payer in the Democratic Party is a perfect example of this fact. When Bernie Sanders unveiled a proposal for this policy in September of 2017 (and again in 2019), it received wide support from many members within his party, ranging from then-Senator Kamala Harris to Kristen Gillibrand to Cory Booker. The bill didn’t go anywhere, though. Republicans controlled the Senate, and it failed to pass committee, let alone go to the floor for a vote where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have blocked it.

However, when these three Senators ran for president during the 2020 election cycle, they seemed to backtrack their support. Candidates such as Kamala Harris and Corry Booker became more resistant to the idea of eliminating private insurance in favor of our government financing healthcare. “I stand by supporting Medicare for All,” he remarked in an interview, “But I’m also that pragmatist that when I’m chief executive of the country … I’m going to find the immediate things that we can do.”

Now that Democrats control a slim majority in the Senate, these leaders are once again hesitant to push for single-payer. As Cory Booker recently told Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic: “I applaud Obama for doing health care and saving the economy, but a lot of Americans felt that that was them losing their autonomy over their health care and a big Wall Street bailout. Then we got demolished in the midterms.” It seems strange to advocate for an issue when it had no chance of passing in the Senate, only to backtrack when you are politically closer to that goal. It makes it seem as though Booker’s cosponsorship didn’t mean anything politically, only optically.

While the Republicans did not threaten to filibuster Bernie's bill in 2017 and 2019 because they were in the majority at the time, the tactic still plays a huge role in this culture of performativity. Many Democrats are well aware that the filibuster’s preservation means certain issues will never make it to the floor. Even if Democrats had had a majority in 2017, Republicans would have never allowed a vote on it. This reality means that many Democrats could signal their support of single-payer on a vote they ultimately disagreed with and let Republican obstructionism “tie their hands.”

Republicans employ this tactic as well. Democrats filibustered a series of policy initiatives during the second half of Trump’s presidency, including funding for the infamous border wall. Democrats blocked a Pentagon funding bill that would have financed it in 2019. As McConnell lamented shortly after the bill was blocked: “…over the past week and a half, we’ve seen our Democratic colleagues suggest that they may try to shoehorn their long-standing disagreements with President Trump into this appropriation process.”

If then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seriously believed in border wall funding, though, he would have either amended the filibuster (e.g., what Republicans did for Neil M. Gorsuch’s Supreme Court appointment in 2017) or used a procedure known as budget reconciliation (e.g., what Republicans did to pass the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts) to bypass the filibuster. He knew that that bill had no chance of succeeding on the floor — a fact even someone with a passing understanding of Senate procedures was well aware of. In the words of columnist Marc A. Thiessen for The Washington Post:

“More often than not, the majority doesn’t even bring up legislation that does not have 60 votes needed to cut off debate. Just the threat of a Democratic filibuster stopped Republicans from moving forward on a host of priorities.”

Instead, McConnell let a vote he knew would be filibustered into oblivion go to the floor for the very reason that it would die. He wanted to tell his constituents to “blame the Democrats” for Trump’s chief campaign promise failing to pass.

As we can see, the filibuster provides these parties political cover. It lets both parties pin the other side as “the bad guy” so they can continue business as usual. Many moderates claim to value honesty and pragmatism. “Honesty [is] always the best policy,” writes the Modern Moderate blog. “America has been served best by leaders who tell the truth.”

And so, it seems strange that so many moderates would cling to an idea that ultimately encourages mendacious leadership.

The filibuster was a procedural accident made more or less 200 years ago. We have been unable to remove it because it entrenches the political minority with the ability to obstruct reasoned debate and compromise. Leaders on all sides of the political spectrum have been attempting to undo this loophole almost since its inception. Yet, the mistake has persisted so long we now falsely assume that it's an integral part of this country's political fabric.

The moderates I have met in my day-to-day life claim to care about political ideals such as reasoned debate, integrity, and efficiency. I have seen moderates lecture about the need for this country to come together and support bipartisan legislation.

And yet paradoxically, many moderates are defending the preservation of the filibuster — a tactic that accomplishes the exact opposite of all of these principles. A filibuster is an act of obstructionism. It obfuscates the political process so much so that it increases corruption and the mendacity of our leaders. We gain nothing from defending it.

Be the types of people you claim to be — abolish the filibuster — and let Congress govern again.

Alex Has Opinions 1/29/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/29/21

How to Write at the End of the World

The how-to guide for being an ethical writer on this burning planet

It sometimes feels like it’s both the best and worst time alive to be a writer. If you have a computer connection, it has never been easier to publish your thoughts to the semi-public space known as the Internet (though your mileage may vary depending on an array of factors). You hit publish, and the possibility of hundreds, maybe even thousands of viewers, suddenly appears on the horizon.

Simultaneously, we live during a time period where so many looming problems, both within the industry and outside of it, are on the horizon. We not only have to juggle predatory digital platforms, terrible pay, long hours, and waves and waves of spam, but also navigate a planet with a deteriorating climate and political system. It’s difficult to get out of bed some mornings, let alone produce words that are both ethical and profitable.

As the world burns around us, we have to decide how to use our words to make it better. We may not be able to change society in a single keystroke, but we can use them to care for those around us.

Writers are often removed from “the action.” There are, of course, journalists on the ground during tumultuous periods in history, but even they have to set aside hours at a time putting down their words. The act of writing involves hunkering down and being alone with your thoughts (and hopefully research), and that’s a very isolating feeling. Ernest Hemming wrote, perhaps with a bit too much certainty, that “writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

When there is so much bad happening around us, that disconnect can make it seem like we are removed from the work that really matters. I constantly have this gut impulse to drop everything I am doing to join a nonprofit or couch surf while spending the rest of my life volunteering on political campaigns. Volunteering, of course, does matter. However, since this activity is action-oriented— or at least it is in my head (nonprofit work and volunteering truthfully involve a lot of downtime as well) — I tend to overinflate the importance of this labor and devalue my own work.

The writer Jame Baldwin in his unfinished work Remember This House — which famously was used in Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) — talked in length about how he felt removed from the activism of the Civil Rights Movement. He was not involved in the planning or organizing of that era but instead emphasized acting as a witness to them, saying: “…part of my responsibility as a witness was to move as largely and as freely as possible to write the story and get it out.”

This concept of bearing witness to a truth and disseminating it to larger society certainly has been effective in the past. There are works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which spoke of the pesticide DDT and the meat-packing industry, respectively, that led to profound policy changes in American society. The public’s reaction surrounding Silent Spring is widely cited as the reason DDT was eventually banned. The Jungle led to new federal food safety laws (though it’s important to note that no one action is ever solely responsible for any political change).

Meaningful work also doesn’t have to be about “hard-hitting” subjects either. One of the largest cultural battles of the 2010s was Gamergate, which initially was a harassment campaign against high profile female journalists and designers in the game industry, and quickly morphed into a battle of what types of messages can be in media. As Aja Romano wrote in Vox:

“The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.”

A cottage industry of reactionaries and progressives alike sprung up to critique our media's values (most famously Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series), and that debate had direct political consequences for our world. Video game forums became staging grounds for recruitment and featured prominently in the commentary of white supremacists such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Banon.

Any subject can change our culture for better or worse. In one often repeated example, Martin Lurther King Jr. famously told actress Nichelle Nichols not to quit the show Star Trek because her character Uhura was, in his mind, one of the few instances of equality on American television. There are so many instances of people reading or watching a fictional character, and that character then inspires them to follow a certain profession or path.

The works we consume can profoundly impact how we perceive the world, so it’s naive for me or anyone to claim that some writing doesn’t matter simply because it’s not winning awards or directly shaping policy. The important question is not whether it matters, but rather if we are putting in that work to make the world better.

It’s a difficult thing to know what work will inspire change. Some people spend their entire lives laboring on novels and scripts that, for various reasons, both personal and professional, never see the light of day. We cannot control if we produce the next prolific piece of art that everything one is talking about, and even then, we cannot control how our work will be received. Still, we can try to make it a habit to care about the world around us and infuse that care into our writing.

When we talk about giving back, a lot of the conversation focuses on grand acts of charity. The web hones in on big-name writers such as Nora Roberts, who give millions of dollars annually to charities or writers like Sylvia Day, who actively encourages her fans' input to see what organizations she should contribute to. Charitable giving can seem almost like a publicity stunt as authors such as Shannon M. Parker and Amber Smith donate a part of the proceeds they make from their novels to nonprofits. These writers may be genuine in their philanthropy, but it also acts as good press to up their book sales.

As writers of the Internet, though, such extravagant giving may not always be a possibility. We are constrained by very toxic systems (i.e., social media, poor labor laws, contract law, etc.) that are too numerous to get into here. This has never been a lucrative profession. I understand that often we do not get to focus on everything that we want to write about. Many of us are freelancers with tight deadlines, and sometimes, hell, most of the time, you have to take the contract that focuses on boosting the SEO of a travel resort or a finance website.

However, there are small ways that we can try to add acts of care into what we do. One of my favorite blogs on Instagram is an astrology account called Bitch Rising. In between funny posts about big Libra energy and Capricorn mood boards, they are plugging handles for Native-owned businesses and encouraging people to vote.

This signal boosting proves that you do not have to be a James Baldwin to have an impact. We can do thousands of small things with our platforms and our words to make the world slightly better: we can plug the efforts of other businesses or organizations; we can promote policy; we can even uplift the work of other artists.

Another type of care goes back to the act of being a witness. While we may not always have the privilege to publish hard-hitting news or the next great American novel, bearing witness to someone gives them the luxury of feeling seen. There are plenty of people who feel unrepresented by society, and there is a certain power in giving them a vehicle to be heard.

For example, the concept of pride within the LGBTQIA+ movement was so important because mainstream society had made many queer people feel worthless. A lot of effort was placed in building a community of acceptance as a strategy for political power — hence Pride becoming a rallying call for queer people across the US and the world. As one of the original organizers of this movement remarked in an interview with The Allusionist in 2015:

“People did not have power then; even now, we only have some. But anyone can have pride in themselves, and that would make them happier as people, and produce the movement likely to produce change.”

Representation matters a great deal in these instances, and the characters you create don’t have to have a widespread appeal. They really only have to make one person feel less shitty. If your words lessen the anxiety and dread of a single person who feels hurt and gaslit by this broken society, then you are doing something pretty damn special.

And so I ask again, are you doing the work to write things that make the world slightly less shitty?

Are you trying to challenge the power of others?
Are you advancing the material conditions of those around you?
Do you try to uplift voices or make people feel less alone?

It would be unreasonable to ask anyone to grapple with all these questions simultaneously, but it's fair to demand that all of us work on at least one of them.

We are facing unprecedented challenges as a species. If you have somehow managed to capture the eyeballs of thousands, maybe even millions of people, and you use that moment to advance an unhelpful discourse, and maybe even a false one, then you should feel guilty. You are not a helpful writer, and that realization should sting a little.

The job of a writer has always been a complicated one. We feel the weight of being both removed and connected. Our words touch people’s lives, but we rarely understand how far they travel or their full impact on the world. It’s sometimes difficult to assess whether what we are doing matters at all, especially if what we write about seems so far removed from the “big questions” plaguing our society.

It all matters, though, because people do not choose what words impact them. They take in all the content they run across, and that means everything from the grandest essay about human nature to the smallest review on a video game can influence what someone believes. We have to care about what we focus on, but simultaneously we need to recognize that we do not have complete control over our impact.

While the toxic systems we exist within prevent us from having full agency over our lives, and a few of us have far more agency than others, most of us can do something. We might not be able to mitigate the majority of the harm in our work — because many times we have to take a harmful contract or job to eat (that’s life) — but we still should push at the margins to advance work that helps the world. It’s our moral imperative to do so.

Otherwise, we become passive witnesses in the world's destruction, and that’s not an ending worth writing about.

Alex Has Opinions 1/22/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/22/21

How Psychological Mechanisms Undermine Movements On The Left

The roots of leftist infighting and the path towards healing.

Recently, there was a heated disagreement in leftist spaces over how to vote for the Speaker of the House. Some leftists wanted leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to threaten to withhold votes from incumbent Nancy Pelosi unless she promised to hold a vote on Medicare for All legislation during the 2021 calendar year.

AOC disagreed with this strategy for a variety of reasons we are not going to be going over here (read Paul Blest’s A Medicare for All Vote Isn’t Worth the Risk as well as Briahna Joy Gray’s The Case for Forcing a Floor Vote on Medicare for All to inform yourself on the pros and cons). She instead voted to affirm Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership, and that earned her a lot of criticism. While some of that criticism was tame, other remarks were far more pointed. “AOC just voted 4 Pelosi as Speaker without getting anything in return… She is not our friend, just another corrupt politician,” tweeted one user. Leftist commenters felt so betrayed by AOC’s position on this issue that they were willing to label her an enemy.

There is a joke in leftist circles, told a million different ways, but the punchline basically comes down to this: there is nothing the Left hates more than itself. The joke is about how fractured some leftists can be when they actually come together to coordinate. Disagreements that seem small to some can spiral into large ordeals for others and vice versa.

Now, of course, not every leftist organization and group is this dysfunctional. It should be noted right from the onset that many leftist organizations have formed robust coalitions with countless different groups, which will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. The prevalence of this meme speaks more to a feeling than an absolute reality. The fact that so many leftists routinely complain about this “problem” highlights something that is far more psychological than ideological.

While some of these disagreements are genuinely political, many of them appear to be defense mechanisms against past and current trauma.

Leftists spend most of their time being an ideological “other.” The percentage of people who identify on the left in the United States is far less than self-identified moderates and people on the right. The same trend remains true in Western Europe. The further left of the political spectrum someone goes, the more likely they will be a minority even within the Left. When we talk about groups such as self-identified communists or anarchists, they are so small that in most countries, we don’t really have good data around how many of them there are.

We often hear rightists lament about being a persecuted minority in America, but the data doesn’t support that conclusion. Republicans still hold a disproportionate amount of power at every governmental level and continue to dominate the judiciary and state legislatures. We are in many ways still living under the Reagan alignment that came to fruition during the 1980s. It’s common for Republican and Democratic leaders alike to preach the value of market-based solutions and limited government intervention.

While people on the right occasionally get penalized for their opinions (via losing their jobs or platform), this isn’t because of some leftist conspiracy. The ability to fire someone for a political opinion is actually because of our political landscape's right-leaning nature. We have undermined workers' rights so much so that businesses can terminate their workers for trivial things such as hairstyles, clothing, and of course, political statements made outside of office hours.

In fact, many leftists have been consistently de-platformed over the last few years, and this trend has not garnered nearly as much attention as the de-platforming of right-wing actors. A recent study out of Harvard stated that social media increases social disparities, which is something that ultimately benefits online actors on the right. As sociologist Jen Schradie wrote for NBC:

“Platforms heavily favor conservatives, who not only have war chests of funding but also a swath of digital boots on the ground. And they will marshal their forces if they perceive a threat to that advantage”

On top of the material disparity, many leftists concepts are also viewed negatively by the larger population. For example, most Americans hold an unfavorable perception of the term socialism (although favorability is far higher among Millenials and Gen Zers). Democrat Joe Biden secured support during the 2020 presidential election, in part, by disavowing socialism. It’s common for many Democrats to hold that position as well. In the words of a concerned Democratic parent writing into the Madison newspaper the Isthmus about their son's leftist radicalism:

“I’ve tried to talk our son out of his extreme positions, but he has a well-thought-out argument justifying his new radicalism. It’s been impossible to make any headway, intellectually or emotionally. Did we create a monster by politicizing him at too young an age?”

Even when people do not decry their leftist children as “monsters,” the language can get quite nasty. “You, Mr. Greiner, are the scum of the earth and a part of the reason that there will be a civil war in this country in your lifetime,” reads the line of an email sent to writer Michael Greiner, ultimately inspiring them to write the article On Being Unapologetically Liberal. Rude and demeaning language is by no means the worst outcome either. Leftists have been the victims of doxxing, harassment, and physical violence for expressing their opinions publically.

This unpopularity means that many on the Left have had to defend this provocative identity all of their lives against both outward detractors and alleged allies. It’s not easy being hated by the political majority, and that can take its toll. You inevitability develop defense mechanisms for dealing with that intense rejection.

Those trauma responses are understandable, but when you spend your entire life trying to prove that your political identity is valid against practically everyone, sometimes it becomes hard to sort out your critics from your enemies.

A popular meme about trauma is that it gives you “thicker skin,” or that it lets you not get “offended” by language and actions that bother you. This line of thinking can be partially true. Some people develop “mature defense mechanisms” (i.e., ones that don’t distort your feelings or reality) to deal with triggers. For example, they learn to sublimate the stress into an action that is considered “constructive” by society or use humor to de-escalate a situation.

The sad reality ignored by people using the “thicker skin” meme is that trauma often translates into defense mechanisms that are “neurotic” (i.e., they distort your emotions) or “immature” (i.e., they distort your perception of reality). Just as many people are as likely to repress their feelings or dissociate entirely when exposed to stressful situations. For example, “The Sunken Place” — the otherworldly realm Black people sink into in Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) — was such a powerful metaphor because it tapped into a real feeling. Many Black people have described using dissociation as a tool to deal with the ongoing white supremacy in America.

Although the trauma is not the same, leftism brings with it its own sort of baggage. As we have already established, many leftists experience stigmatization and other penalties for expressing their views, leading to the same neurotic and immature defense mechanisms. It’s normal to hear how leftists repress the way they feel on a day-to-day basis. “I don’t even want to open the box,” describes someone referred to as Dev in Psychology Today on why they don’t speak politics with their parents. “It’s more than normal, totally off-limits. In 2012, we did have some conversation, and I don’t want to go there again.” Dev reportedly had been kicked out of his parents' house at 18 years old because of these political differences and now refuses to bring the subject up.

There are many ways people react to this kind of trauma. Some people don’t develop “thicker skin,” but rather a greater sensitivity to the perceived threats around them. Trauma gives them “thinner skin.” They are on high alert all the time, which can create a tendency to pounce on even the smallest of threats.

This “thin skin” happens with many different types of groups, especially those exposed to a lot of trauma. For example, it’s been written about how many queer people are cruel to one another because trauma has given them defense mechanisms that flatten interactions into either all good or all bad, referred to in Psychology as splitting. When someone in their community does something “bad,” they are swift to roast that person as awful. As author Kai Cheng Thom writes for Daily Extra in their brilliant piece Why are queer people so mean to each other?:

“This, I believe, is why traumatized communities struggle so profoundly with loving one another. We have been hard-wired for suspicion and terror of betrayal, which in turn feeds into the logics of disposability and incarceration: we come to believe that making a mistake — any mistake, whether big or small — makes someone bad and dangerous.”

You see this same dynamic play out again and again in leftist spaces, especially anonymous spaces online. Spend a couple of hours persuing Twitter or Instagram, and you will see two users with roses in their bios tearing each other down over a disagreement an outside viewer can hardly understand. Eventually, someone blocks the other person, and they brag about how they have happily burned a bridge with someone more ideologically aligned to them than 90% of the country.

An infamous example of this comes from a series of minor snafus YouTuber Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) made in 2020. She Tweeted something mildly insensitive about nonbinary people. She also gave an eight-second voice-over clip to a transgender person named Buck Angel, considered by some to be enbyphobic (i.e., discriminatory towards trans people outside the male-female binary). These decisions upset many people and caused a scandal she attempted to address in a video entitled Canceling.

Now maybe Wynn does have some mild internalized transphobia —a lot of trans people do (raises hand awkwardly). This article aims not to claim who is right or wrong but rather to highlight how quickly the situation escalated. There were a lot of people who not only criticized her actions but labeled her trans or enbyphobic. As one trans user put it:

“weird how im 30 and trans and managed not to be a truscum. maybe im just some kind of anomaly. or maybe contrapoints is a conniving ratfucking kapo who could do with a fully wound backhand to the mouth idk lol.”

Those are are some intense words for an indiscretion that is ultimately minor, and truthfully they are remarks that sound very similar to the comments leftists have received from people on the Right. While Wynn definitely deserved to be held accountable for saying something problematic (we all do), there is a world of difference between someone who says something problematic (i.e., everyone) and someone such as the author J. K. Rowling who has made transphobia an active part of her identity. The first one requires accountability while the latter needs to be defended against.

Yet this escalation makes perfect sense when you look at it from the lens of trauma. These posters are not necessarily invested in Wynn as much as they are interested in defending their in-group from perceived threats. They are treating a minor indiscretion as an existential threat because they are conflating conflict with betrayal.

Most people are protective of their identities, and leftists are no exception. A quick Google search will reveal thousands of semantic arguments about whether someone is a “true” leftist. Many commenters will take pains to distinguish between a liberal and a leftist, and the disdain between these two groups is palatable. “…when push comes to shove,” writes Ted Rall in Rasmussen Reports, “liberals will ultimately sell out their radical allies to the powers that be. And they will run away at the first sign of state oppression.”

This visceral reaction to preserve one’s identity from outside threats exists with any in-group, but something that needs to be acknowledged is that much of leftist anger is valid. There has historically been a lot of effort to squash leftist discourse in a way that doesn’t exist for conservative and centrist movements. The FBI has targeted a wide range of entities, from civil rights leaders to the communist party to independent black-owned bookstores. The CIA has infamously tried to suppress leftist movements both in the United States and abroad. Even now, there is compelling evidence that the US government is spying on the latest wave of activists, especially Black rights activists. This history has translated into an ironic and sometimes not so ironic paranoia as leftist posters joke about “CIA psyops” and other government infiltration.

Furthermore, while the Left is large enough to help the Democrats swing elections, they are typically not so large a voting bloc to dictate policy. This state of affairs will lead to situations where many US politicians will use progressive rhetoric, only for them to refuse to back progressive policies. For example, during the 2020 campaign trail, Senator Jon Ossoff would tweet statements critical of insurance companies, but in an interview with Axios, he affirmed that he was against policies such as the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all. He had a digital persona of a progressive, but the moment you dove a little deeper, it was apparent that he was more politically moderate.

Many leftists feel that a minority of politicians actively mislead them to gain clout in progressive spaces, which has fostered genuine distrust. It’s not uncommon for a public figure to claim to be progressive, only for them to try to paternalistically undermine that position once they are in power. For example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated that she believes healthcare is a right for all Americans. Whenever advocates try to push for more expansive coverage through Medicare for All, however, she typically warns caution instead. As she told the Washington Post:

“Show me how you think you can get there. We all share the value of health care for all Americans — quality, affordable health care for all Americans. What is the path to that? I think it’s the Affordable Care Act, and if that leads to Medicare for All, that may be the path.”

Yet reporting from the Intercept shows that Pelosi worked behind the scenes to reassure healthcare executives that Medicare for All or single-payer would not make it to the floor. The problem is not that she disagrees with this position but that she pretends that these disagreements are merely political (i.e., what legislation can pass) when it’s evident that she is personally against such policy for either material or ideological reasons. It’s disagreement masquerading as concern. Many leftists consequently have a low bar for what they perceive to be “pretenders” because they have had to sniff them out their entire lives. As user barberwarren13 tweets:

“the reason i’m more critical of typical democrats than republicans is coz dems act like they’re the party of the ~compassionate guys~ but they don’t even believe in socialized healthcare lmao”

You might think that these defense mechanisms wouldn’t fire within more inclusive leftist spaces, but the Left is a paradoxical place of both acceptance and rejection. The Right’s reverence of hierarchy and tradition causes it to reject anyone who doesn’t adhere to mainstream norms. This tension means it’s common to see many Leftists hold various marginalized identities because the Left offers the bare minimum of tolerance.

The Left is not free of discrimination, though. Leftists can still express biases such as racism, sexism, and transphobia. There is an entire subset of people, referred to as class reductionists, who believe that “identity politics” are a distraction that undermine support in leftism from the working class. Leftists can be just as discriminatory as conservatives, but their hatred can sting more because they are supposed to be allies. In the words of Roqayah Chamseddine in her fantastic essay Who are you actually fighting for?:

“Our leftist communities are not immune to this brutality — there are even times in which the political associations of our comrades are used against us in a way that absolves them of their wrongdoings. We are told that they are pillars of the community, that they’re admired, they didn’t mean it, that we must have misunderstood, and on it goes. The excuses are as reactionary as those coming from any other space, and we are forced to combat them just as other women, to prove our humanity.”

This anger and hurt we see in leftist spaces come from a place of real trauma. It’s not wrong for people to want accountability and boundaries from those who have hurt them — those things are never wrong. Our sensitivities developed for a reason. The people who assert otherwise are engaging in emotional manipulation.

For many valid reasons, we are so used to sniffing out potential threats that our defense mechanisms are working on overdrive, and in the process, they can hinder our ability to move past disagreements. It’s an understandable hurdle, and one thankfully many people on the Left have been working on diligently for years.

Over a year ago now, I was at a political meeting where we decided which candidate our local chapter would endorse for city council. There were three major contenders, and conversations were heated. People had intense ideological disagreements over who to pick: some wanted the more established leftist contender; others wanted a promising up-and-comer; more still, campaigned for a middle-of-the-road candidate they claimed non-leftists might be more attracted to.

Surprisingly, however, the conversation never broke down. The moderators took steps to ensure everyone could talk, including weighting questions so more historically marginalized identities had the ability to speak first. People who took too much time were reminded swiftly that they were running over. We then voted for a candidate anonymously, giving plenty of opportunities for people to air grievances.

While ultimately not everyone was happy with the decision we ended up making, we grew to understand everyone’s perspective. It motivated us to address the concerns our members were saying about their preferred candidates. Working groups were established to address some of those gaps — and that work is still ongoing to this day. It is possible to become stronger from disagreements, not to be divided by them.

In political coalitions, disagreements are healthy. They indicate that your movement is large and robust enough to explore the multiple intersections of an issue. Calls for unity are ultimately signs of a movement in decline — one so anemic that it cannot handle everyone inside its tent. We should always want accountability when problems arise within a movement. The banner of free speech becomes problematic when it's used to shield hateful language and actions.

Still, someone disagreeing with your political plans is not in the same vein as someone wronging you personally. Natalie Wynn or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez disagreeing with your opinions on strategy is not the same thing as Nancy Pelosi gaslighting you over single-payer or Donald Trump signing away protections for trans rights.

Many leftists have undergone a lot of trauma — too much for what is fair for one lifetime — but that trauma is not an excuse to dump out all our rage onto the people who activate our well-honed defenses.

I wish I could hold tightly onto everyone this broken society has hurt and shield them from the people seeking to do them harm. It would be nice to block out all the harmful people and only be surrounded by a flawless family of acceptance.

Sadly, no armor is strong enough to block out all that pain, and no family is so perfect.

We, instead, as an act of survival, are given the task of having to make a fairer society — and we will have to do things differently than the oppressors who ruled before us. If we want to build a world better than the one that hurt us, we need accountability over punishment, healing over retribution, and justice over vengeance.

Alex Has Opinions 1/11/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/11/21

Ryan Murphy’s Obsession with Likable Monsters

The creator of Glee and American Horror Story’s problem with centering awful characters

When you think of the word prolific, filmmaker Ryan Murphy is probably not the first person who immediately comes to mind. He likes to discuss how he arrived in Hollywood from Indiana with just $55 dollars in his pocket. With over a dozen shows and movies under his belt and a lucrative deal with Netflix, prolific is exactly what he has become.

The creator of American Horror Story (2011 — present) and Glee (2009–2015) is known for making campy, over-the-top works with a distinctive flair. You can recognize the hallmarks of a Murphy production before his name ever appears on screen: his characters have larger-than-life dialogue; his costumes and set designs have dazzling palettes; his characters’ motivations and desires are all intense as they claw their way to fame, mayhem, and maybe even a little murder.

Another quality often gets overlooked, though, and that is his obsession with glamorizing sociopaths. His most famous and endearing characters are figurative and sometimes literal monsters he lovingly renders for the viewer. Murphy has long been a proponent for uplifting marginalized voices both on-screen and off, but his fixation with highlighting awful people says something unsettling about his sense of priorities as a filmmaker.

Monsters are everywhere in Ryan Murphy’s work. They can be found directly in series such as American Horror Story — an anthology series that deconstructs a different set of horror conventions every season — and metaphorically in crime dramas such as American Crime Story (2016 — present). He tends to focus on people who would normally be the villains in a story and gives them portrayals that, although not always redemptive, are at the very least empathetic. As Willa Paskin writes of the serial killer Andrew Cunanan in the second season of American Crime Story:

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace does not justify Cunanan — he is, always, self-pitying and lazy, unwilling to choose a better course — but it does more than simply try to comprehend him. Occasionally it has compassion for him…Criss, [the actor who plays Cunanan], is brilliant, fully self-pitying, the loneliest, saddest psycho in America.”

We see this theme of empathy for the outcasts in most of his work. American Horror Story has a literal season called Freakshow. The series Pose (2018 — present) is all about queer, mainly trans New Yorkers, trying to thrive in the underground ballroom scene of the 1990s. Even Glee, his arguably tamest work, is about a group of high school outcasts and self-described “losers” (see the song “Loser Like Me”), struggling to find acceptance in the world of singing competitions. In a Ryan Murphy production, there is usually one sappy monologue about love and acceptance for every scene of gore and trauma.

This fixation on “freaks” is not that unusual for a queer man to have, especially for one devoted to film. There is a long history of queer people in media being branded as villains. The Motion Picture Production Code (1930 — 1968), also referred to as the Hay’s Code, and later the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 — 1983) or the Television’s Code, infamously banned positive portrayals of “sexual perversions,” which LGBTQIA+ people were definitely considered at the time.

If a director wanted to have an LGBTQIA+ character in their production, they had to rely on stereotypical, queer-coding, and cast that character as a villain. This era of Hollywood is filled with wicked queer-coded characters such as the criminal Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the serial killer Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960). Long after the Hays and Television codes were laid to rest, the image of queer villainy remained in roles such as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in The Silence of The Lambs (1991) and Doctor Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in Dressed To Kill (1980).

The connection between queerness and horror has another more psychological foundation. Many queer people are also intimately familiar with the feeling of rejection that comes from greater society labeling them as monsters. When everyone treats you poorly, so much so that your own stories cannot even be shown with humanity, then you develop a sort of empathy for the disturbed and rejected. As Advocate editors wrote on why many LGBTQIA+ viewers have an affinity for horror:

“Since many of us have been demonized in our lifetimes, we have a special place in our hearts for the demons, monsters, and other outsiders who wreak havoc and revenge upon heteronormative society…Due to this dynamic, there are some horror films in particular that speak to LGBTQ folks.”

This love for dastardly figures can be seen as a defense mechanism for dealing with trauma. Numerous queer people have arguably embraced wicked characters such as Disney villains and the Babadook because many of them have felt unloved and reviled. It’s a decision to give out the love you were denied to people who also have been refused the benefit of the doubt. “That’s how it works for us freaks. We get blamed for everything,” says the character Pepper (Naomi Grossman) in American Horror Story: Asylum.

For this reason, there is a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching Ryan Murphy unapologetically reclaim this space. He takes horror — which is this genre that has had a decidedly queer subtext for over half a century — and places its queer messaging front and center. He dresses up his murderous ghosts in leather fetish suits (e.g., American Horror Story: Murder House) and gives his serial killer nurse a steamy tryst with lesbian icon Cynthia Nixon (e.g., Ratched). It can be cathartic to see the monster you have felt yourself to be for so long spotlighted and normalized in episode after episode of prestige television.

However, not all of his monsters serve these purposes. There are characters such as Sue Sylvester in Glee, who are only cruel and vindictive. While it's certainly fine to have one-dimensional characterizations of monsters, Murphy seems to have a fixation, not just on the ostracized but also on people who are irredeemably mean.

In glorifying these awful people and creatures, his works can sometimes come at the cost of obscuring the message of why many of us were drawn to monsters in the first place.

The thing about queer people is that they obviously aren’t monsters. They were made to feel that way by a cruel society. Queer people’s rejection meant that they often had to find acceptance in the margins, which in the case of media, meant latching onto subtextual representation like horror movie monsters. It was never about the monsters themselves, but what they represented — e.g., ostracization, rejection, and in some cases, vengeance.

A great example of a film that makes this subtext text is Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017). The movie is a reference to the 1954 horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which the climax has a group of scientists rescuing a woman (Julie Adams) abducted by a menacing Gill Monster. In Guillermo del Toro’s quazi-retelling, it's the monster who is abducted. The U.S. government has captured the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones) and placed them inside a secret facility. A cleaner there named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) falls in love with him.

The Amphibian Man is not really a monster, but a person being held against their will. The true villain is Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), who is in charge of studying the Amphibian Man to help America in the Cold War. Strickland terrorizes the Amphibian Man and intimidates the film’s queer, disabled, and BIPOC characters. He ultimately represents a cipher for the harm inflicted by U.S. imperialism on the marginalized groups represented in the film. As an outcast of the world Strickland represents, the main character Elisa identifies with the “monster,” and as the film comes to a close, she grows gills so she can be apart of the Amphibian Man’s world.

There are other interesting ways to utilize the “monster” angle. They can sometimes be figures of righteous anger enacting vengeance on a cruel society. The character Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) in Promising Young Woman (2021) may be hellbent on revenge, but she is one specifically targeting “nice guys” (and female enablers) who take advantage of women sexually. The mom (Kathleen Turner) in Serial Mom (1994) is also a serial killer, but her entire characterization is designed to skewer the norms of white, suburban America.

Ryan Murphy does have characters throughout his filmography who do hit upon these themes. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has a running theme about how the homophobia of the 90s contributed partly to the murderous entitlement of serial killer Andrew Cunanan. American Horror Story: Hotel (2015), conversely ends warmly with the Hotel Cortez's ghosts killing the character Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) so that they can stay together in limbo for all of eternity as one big, weird family.

This empathy, however, extends to a lot of ‘lovable’ villains as well. Ryan Murphy is also known for creating monstrous characters who we still like despite their awfulness. These are monsters who serve no other point than to be monstrous. They are not rejected by greater society like the Amphibian Man or enact vengeance like Cassandra. Like Colonel Strickland, they berate the marginalized, and they usually look cool as hell doing it.

One of the main characters for American Horror Story: Asylum is the domineering Sister Jude Martin (Jessica Lange). She is a person who takes a certain glee in torturing the inmates of the asylum, and yet we were not supposed to dislike her. She has some of the series most stand-out moments. When she ironically becomes trapped in the very asylum she once served, the other main characters go to great lengths to save her. “But Jude, whatever she was, she didn’t belong there any more than we did,” the character Kit Walker (Evan Peters) says to Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) — a reporter Sister Jude had committed to the asylum to hide the negligence occurring there.

Another terrifying example is cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) from the show Glee. She is remembered for being devilishly funny when the show first aired, but a lot of her comedic lines are simply hateful in retrospect. “I’ll often yell at homeless people. Hey, how’s that homelessness working out for you? Give not being homeless a try, huh?” the character remarks on their fictional talk show. This line is supposed to be a joke and is by no means an anomaly. Sue uses her influence as one of the most powerful people in the school (and the state of Ohio) to bully the Glee club members. The series ends with her winning the Vice Presidency of the United States.

Likewise, the show The Politician (2019 — present) is centered on a rich trust fund kid named Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) as he tries to navigate his school’s election for class president (and later local politics) in a single-minded attempt to eventually be president of the United States. Payton has structured his entire life to reach that goal, and he does some truly detestable things in that pursuit of power, such as threatening to out a closeted classmate, culminating in that student's suicide. The narrative briefly punishes him for these indiscretions, but ultimately he skyrockets to political success. In fact, after one of his campaign operatives tampers with ballots, the story goes out of its way to tell the viewer that he would have received those votes regardless.

There are so many of these characters in Murphy’s filmography— Emma Roberts from Scream Queens (2015 — present), the doctors in Nip/Tuck (2003–2010), Evan Peters in nearly every one of his characters in American Horror Story. These villains are typically white, usually rich, and almost always hold more power than those beneath them. They may not be fully redeemed by the time their story ends, but they are often framed in a way that makes them desirable to the viewer. They have the most memorable moments or lines and are usually fan favorites.

Even when they lose, they look damn amazing doing it, and unlike figures such as the Amphibian Man, they are not empathetic to those around them. They are all mean, powerful white sociopaths, inflicting harm on the marginalized characters around them.

We should question the trend of making them “likable.”

People often identify with monsters because of what they represent in the narrative. When monsters are unfairly rejected by society, they can represent a cipher for various oppressed identities. We see this theme in works such as American Horror Story: Hotel or, far more directly, in The Shape of Water. Monsters can also represent the spirit of vengeance, satire, and a host of other useful things in a story. In the case of many Ryan Murphy works, they chiefly serve the purpose of being fun.

It would be unrealistic and unfair to say that no one should ever use monsters in their narrative unless they are perfectly well-rounded. Sometimes your story needs a one-dimensional villain, which is fine, perhaps a tad boring, but fine. We cannot dictate to people that they must only portray “the other” if it fits a certain function in the story. However, when you start to develop a pattern of awful “likable” characters who actively inflict misery on those around them, that speaks to your sense of priorities as a filmmaker.

Ryan Murphy is not a terrible person. He has uplifted many marginalized voices both on and off the screen, and that is worthy of praise. The creation of Pose — one of the most trans-inclusive shows in history — is an achievement that far exceeds what most of his powerful white peers in the industry are trying to accomplish. Still, at the same time, he is no longer that broke 20-something who has just moved to Hollywood from Indiana. As one of the most powerful people in his industry, he has blind spots that merit criticism, and what characters he decides to center and provide empathy for is one of them.

There will always be monsters in our stories, but as we come to reckon with our country’s past abuses, we should question uplifting abusive monsters for the sake of light entertainment.

Alex Has Opinions 1/4/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/4/21

‘Star Wars’ Made Us Unprepared For Fascism

The Galaxy Far Far Away set the bar too high for evil.

At the core of the decades-spanning space opera Star Wars, sits a cosmic battle between the Light and the Dark Side of the force, the latter of which is led by the evil Sith who have terrorized the galaxy in their pursuit of total conquest.

Sith like Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and Kylo Ren have captivated the popular imagination as ciphers for absolute evil. We have watched in cruel fascination as these men have demonstrated what being the worst truly means, staging master plans laid out months, if not decades in advance, only for them to be undone at the last possible moment.

However, these examples have had the unfortunate effect of setting the bar far too high for our conception of evil, and conversely, too low for good’s triumph against it. While some people undoubtedly fit inside the Sithian mold quite comfortably (i.e., that of a sociopathic murderer who outlines every second of their master plan years beforehand), evil often is done by incompetent showmen inflicting untold harm as they go. They lie, cheat, and steal without any cackling monologues or Chessmaster finesse — all with unearned privilege, bravado, and a smile.

Emperor Palpatine has been a fixture of evil for over four decades. He was first popularly introduced as a hologram in the movie The Empire Strikes Back (1980) as he directs his subordinate Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) to stop Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) from becoming a Jedi, killing him if necessary. He is the picture of ultimate evil, someone so malicious that even Vader eventually turns on him by the end of the original trilogy. He is a fascist of the highest order — someone who has created an entire Empire devoted to serving his will alone.

The picture we have of Palpatine is that of the perfect manipulator. He rose to power by creating a series of galactic incidents (e.g., an armed trade dispute over the planet of Naboo, an intergalactic Civil War, etc.) that he secretly orchestrated behind the scenes while serving in the Galactic Senate. He somehow managed to mobilize hundreds of systems into open rebellion without anyone ever being the wiser about his involvement. He then sidelined these former allies at the first available opportunity to declare martial law within the Galactic Republic and become Emperor.

He accomplishes all of these evil machinations while serving in one of the galaxy's most powerful and scrutinized institutions, and again, very few people walk away with a thorough understanding of what happens until years after the fact. All his enemies are either coopted (e.g., Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader), exiled (see Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi), or killed by the time the prequel trilogy comes to a close. His power so cemented that the Galatic Senate dissolves at the start of the original movie, A New Hope (1977).

In pop culture, there is a name for this trope: “The Chessmaster.” The designation is in reference to how chess is often used as a visual shorthand in film and television to convey the cunning and manipulativeness of a character. It’s quite common to see scenes where two characters play chess and for that interaction to represent a battle occurring between them metaphorically. Sometimes this metaphor can be quite literal such as when Hades (James Woods) in Disney’s Hercules (1997) places monsters on his board to represent the hero’s twelve labors or when the spy Control (John Hurt) in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) tapes pictures of suspects onto chess pieces. These Chessmasters move characters about on a board to symbolize plots occurring in the real world.

Mostly, though, this trope is less about the game of chess and more about how the characters are portrayed as cold and calculating figures able to stay multiple steps ahead of everyone else in the story. We see Chessmasters a lot in fiction because, unlike in reality, an author has the power to decide that a single person really can organize a series of events singlehandedly. The Emperor conquers the galaxy because George Lucas wills it so. It’s easier as a writer to pin all of your narrative choices on a single entity than the series of inter-connected causes that affect real-life events.

We tend to retrospectively do this with real-world people as well. It’s typical for people to argue that historical figures, even terrible ones such as Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, grew to prominence because of their political genius. Part of this has to do with the intense propaganda machines they led during the height of their power. Stalin and Hitler were both built up into almost Superman-like figures by their people, yet that narrative found itself even in outlets beyond their control. As professor Frederick C. Barghoorn wrote of the former Soviet leader in their 1953 New York Times article What It Takes to Be a Stalin:

“Stalin’s role as political intrigue and boss is well known. He was able to crush opposition both in high party circles and among the masses because he was a brilliant and ruthless totalitarian politician. This means that he knew how at any given time to command the loyalty of the party and state bureaucracy and to avoid pushing the masses so far that the morale and cohesion of the ruling apparatus might be seriously affected.”

To this day, we still see people praise the genius of dictators such as Stalin or Hitler, even as they decry the horrors they committed. When, for example, the blog Leadershipgeeks.com penned an article on what could be learned from Hitler’s leadership style, they focused on the “positive lessons” you could emulate from him, saying:

“…Hitler was a captivating public speaker. He would enrapture crowds with his vision and sense of purpose of the nation. His words moved a country, even the church to believe that they were killing in the name of God. That was the extent of his charisma.”

This frames his charisma almost as an otherworldly force that acted upon the German people. It portrays his will as something so strong that it overpowered God-fearing people's senses to the point of making them murderers. It also coincidentally absolves the German people of all responsibility by placing the source of that evil in one bad person's hands.

In truth, real fascism does not work like the Galactic Empire. It cannot come about because of the manipulations of a single individual, or even a group of individuals, but rather because an in-group has been given the social permission to enact beliefs they already have.

Fascism is a group sport.

When we look at men like Hitler, the trauma they helped cause was so terrible that it understandably left a scar on the public imagination. Hitler’s name, and really Nazism in general, has become a sort of boogie man used to personify the worst kinds of evil.

In pop culture, Hitler often shows up to bolster some of the worst causes throughout history: his regime is what gives rise to the fringe science organization HYDRA in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); he’s seen shaking hands with the devil in horror, B-movie Faust: Love of the Damned (2000); and cloning and replicating his upbringing is the primary plot point of the book and film The Boys From Brazil (1976/1978).

From this lens, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that fascist leaders were real people unable to foresee all the events that brought them fully to power. They may have made plans intended to last decades only for them to fall apart spectacularly in real life. Hitler’s first major grab for power, for example, was a failure. When the Nazi Party attempted a coup in 1923 in the German province of Bavaria, it was ultimately foiled by the region’s military forces. He would eventually gain power through political means (and force), but that didn’t mean his regime was flawless. He had an almost childish demeanor with an overly inflated sense of self. He did not respond to feedback well, which caused him to make strategically poor decisions — most infamously, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Trump also fell into this category, especially during the earlier parts of his first term when many people tried to paint him as a master manipulator. It was common for detractors to warn us not to “get distracted” by his antics and instead be on the lookout for what he really intended. Debates were waged in columns across America on whether he was figurative or literal with his words. It took months, and in some cases years, for people to realize there was no higher point to his rhetoric — there was only ever what he wanted at the moment.

The rebranding of fascists leaders as brilliant Chessmasters ignores the fact that some authoritarians lack political finesse. It also ignores how their hold on power relies initially on support from the larger populace. Authoritarians certainly use violence to grab and maintain power, but they also try to convince their followers that all problems can be solved by worshipping a single authoritarian figure. They can only achieve their nonsensical aims when the greater population passively accepts it.

In his essay Ur-Fascism, commentator Umberto Eco, who grew up during the fascism of Benito Mussolini, listed fourteen qualities defining fascism. Many of these involved a fascist gaining buy-in from their own people, such as by fostering a fear of difference, creating a culture of hero-worship, and appealing to a frustrated middle class. To that last point, he wrote in this essay that people have a habit of scapegoating disenfranchised political groups, writing: “In our time, when the old [working class] are becoming [richer] (and the [dispossessed] are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”

In essence, it’s not the downtrodden who fuel that rise to fascism, but the people just above them. While the exact number of people susceptible to authoritarianism is widely disputed, the simple truth is that, if presented with the right set of arguments, a percentage of any population at any time is amenable to that style of leadership. It’s something many people are primed to believe already, and they don’t need an evil mastermind to make that happen.

This reality fails to show up in a lot of pop culture, especially in the Galaxy Far Far Away, where the opinions of regular people are largely omitted for narrative convenience.

Star Wars is a brand where fascism is a core facet of its mythos (e.g., the Sith, the Empire, the First Order, etc.), but somehow it has villains so far removed from our empathic understanding that its possible as an audience member to walk away not really understanding how fascism works.

While the Expanded Universe (now Star Wars Legends) has some works that examine the propaganda and anti-alien xenophobia that helped give rise to the Empire (see the Thrawn trilogy and the video game Knights of the Old Republic), most of the films are a simplistic battle between good and evil. Emperor Palpatine's cruelty can be witnessed within a vacuum, never challenging viewers to seriously comprehend how they might fall within the equation.

This failure to truly contextualize fascism affects how a lot of fans perceive the work itself. A quick search online reveals dozens of articles and videos of fans claiming that the Empire was actually right all along because it provided stability to the galaxy. YouTuber Allen Xie (Generation Tech) talks extensively about this issue on their channel. In his video Imperials Are People Too, he highlights all the times the Rebel Alliance killed members of the Empire military. He remarks of character Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) decision to blow up the planet-destroying Death Star as the following:

“…any other situation, we would question the morality of a man who has killed over a million people, but what did the rebellion do? Give him a medal. History is written by the victors, and the Empire had its flaws. But the next time you go to celebrate the destruction of an Imperial ship or victory of a Rebel hero remember that there are living breathing people behind those blast doors and plastic helmets. “

This is obviously a bad take. The Death Star destroyed nearly 2 billion people when it blew up the planet of Alderaan in A New Hope. Maybe the author is not genuine. The Internet is filled with so much irony and meta-humor that it's sometimes difficult to tell if someone is serious (see Jim Huss’s parody video series). Still, there are so many videos on this subject it speaks to the failure of the text itself. The franchise failed to delineate between what is and what is not fascism so much that an entire subgenre of videos has sprung up arguing that the text validates the very thing it appears to be disproving — that fascism is bad.

Star Wars is not the only franchise that has this issue. The MCU stumbled into the same problem with intergalactic Space Tyrant Thanos (Josh Brolin). As with Emperor Palpatine, Thanos is also portrayed as a manipulative Chessmaster hellbent on dominating the galaxy. In this case, he works behind-the-scenes of all the movies to gather magical infinity stones with the power to rewrite reality. His ultimate plan is to randomly wipe out half of all sentient life in the galaxy.

This plan comes to fruition at the end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), but not in the way we would expect a fascist to achieve their ends. While he does have a small band of committed followers fighting to cull the galaxy, Thanos’ goals are achieved through space magic. He snaps his fingers, and half of everyone we know flutters out of existence.

Unlike with real fascism, the galaxy is a spectator in his horrors, not a participant.

As with Star Wars, this refusal to take a hard stance ultimately made Thanos’ brand of meritocratic Malthusianism sympathetic to many viewers. His simplistic, authoritarian solution was not called out in a way that would challenge viewers' assumptions. #Thanoswasright flooded Twitter and other social media shortly after the film’s release. Soon we had a bunch of bad hot takes espousing the very ideology that a responsible movie would have taken the time to disprove. As JV Chamary wrote in Forbes in his article The Science Of ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Proves Thanos Did Nothing Wrong:

“The Avengers are guilty of putting the grief of survivors above the health of our world. From the planet’s point of view, it’s the superheroes who are the bad guys. Reversing Thanos’ actions is a selfish endeavor…”

Overpopulation’s contribution to climate change is a contentious idea that has been hotly debated elsewhere. Climate change is believed to be exacerbated by other issues, such as overconsumption and wealth inequality. These would not be fixed by removing half of all people at random.

The movie never bothers to have this debate, though. When the second part of the Thanos saga, Avengers: Endgame, aired in April of 2019, the film attempted to disprove the tyrant’s plan by demonstrating the tragedy of all the lives lost, not by tearing apart the fascist ideology Thanos represented. As with Alderaan's destruction, the snap became divorced from its totalitarian ideology to represent a “bad” viewers could consume without getting uncomfortable.

Some works do put viewers in that place of unease, but they are usually Oscar-bait and Indie films, not pop culture hits. The last major time Star Wars attempted to be pointed in its commentary was The Last Jedi (2017), which was arguably a meta-commentary on the Star Wars fandom's toxic masculinity. This film was not idly consumed but instead was widely polarizing among viewers. It became a topic of intense debate precisely because you knew it was trying to say something.

Conversely, Emperor Palpatine’s ideology is too vague and amorphous to be rejected. We don’t understand what the Emperor really wants other than power itself, and because that power has not seriously been scrutinized by the text (merely the person holding it), the viewer doesn’t have to question their political beliefs.

Much of our media has made people think they understand fascism when really they are more familiar with a caricature of fascism: that of an all-knowing, evil Chessmaster who manipulates people into doing things they don’t really want to do from behind the scenes. This type of story-telling does not seek to challenge the viewer's complicity in that evil, which is why so many people can comfortably wrap themselves in Storm Trooper or Thanos paraphernalia without ever feeling awkward.

It’s not bad for a film to talk about fascism. Art reflects life, so artists would inevitably want to talk about an issue so pressing to human culture. This ideology is worth talking about, but a lot of media is employing an overly-simplistic understanding of it — one where the viewer is always blameless.

In real life, people are not tricked into following fascist leaders such as Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump. They follow those monsters willing, and while we can debate the reasons surrounding those decisions, we must not compartmentalize that evil into something only evil masterminds can accomplish. It is sadly not hard to get people to abandon everything in pursuit of hatred.

If we want to prepare people for how to avoid the next fascist regime, then we need media that explores how everyday people can fall to the Dark Side too. Responsible media is not afraid to make its viewers defensive over their capacity to inflict harm, especially when discussing one of the darkest ideologies in human history. It brings them into the text and does not let them look away.

Alex Has Opinions 12/18/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/18/20

The Imperialist Fantasy of Going to Space

Tech’s obsession with leaving the Earth behind and conquering the stars

When the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, gave his final state of the union address before Congress, he invoked the spirit of the frontier to describe his desire to push America into space. He told them: “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier: America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”

Manifest destiny has always been a loaded term. It was initially used to describe the belief that America had a right to expand westward — the rights of the people who already lived there be damned. Our leaders used its as a justification to settle the frontier, and displace millions.

Many people on the left saw this comment as yet another racist remark in a presidency that has embodied them. Yet, it actually struck at something far deeper: how our conception of space travel was built upon an imperialist fantasy of conquest.

Our mythos of space flight often supposes not only that we should leave our planet behind, but that for the betterment of humanity, we must expand outwards into the frontier of space. This expansionist vision of progress has nothing to do with helping humanity, and everything about the powerful grabbling with a settler’s mindset older than America itself.

When entrepreneur Andrew Yang ran for president during the 2020 election cycle, he did so with the slogan: “not left, not right, but forward.” He advocated for an approach to politics not linked to one side of the political spectrum, but one instead backed by “the data.” Yang repeatedly talked on the campaign trail of crunching the numbers, and his supporters often carried around the slogan MATH or Make America Think Harder. He proposed technocratic, “innovative” solutions such as giving every American $1,000 a month to mitigate the effects of automation or to use giant space mirrors to reverse climate change.

Silicon Valley, the community to which Andrew Yang spiritually belongs, has long evangelized that technological progress is both apolitical and a supreme good — a philosophy sometimes referred to as “technological optimism.” We see this sentiment harkening back to the beginning of this country, with some of our nation’s imminent thinkers expressing it. In a letter to Joseph Priestley, scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin lamented that they sometimes regretted being alive at that moment in history because 1,000 years from then, science would be that much more advanced.

This march towards progress has included space as well. President John F. Kennedy famously told Congress over 60 years ago in his speech on why we must go to the moon that “…it in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” JFK painted traveling to space as yet another step in our inevitable march towards progress.

However, space goes far deeper for tech than simply nostalgia for this Cold War-era ambition. The innovations from that initial investment in the space program (i.e., technologies such as computing) formed the future tech industry's foundation. Many people within that field trace a throughline from the Space Race directly to the rise of Silicon Valley. As Basil Hero, reporter and author of the book The Mission of a Lifetime, told CNN Business on the space Apollo program that led the US to the moon: “Without [Apollo], I don’t think the computer revolution would have happened as quickly and on the same trajectory. It would have taken an extra 10 or 20 years.”

The Space Race is an integral aspect of Silicon Valley’s lore. Many of its most successful continue to hold onto the belief that the secret to human prosperity lies within the stars — that expansion is the best way for us to survive. When asked to defend his space venture Blue Origin at the Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony in 2019, Billionaire Jeff Bezos remarked:

“What sounds like freedom to me is moving out into the solar system, where we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, unlimited resources. We’d have a trillion humans in the solar system, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. That’s the world I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.”

If you were to believe the words of people such as Jeff Bezos, then we have been apart of an unending, unquestionable progression. Our reach for space is the next step in that journey — the final frontier. These entrepreneurs tell themselves it's for the good of humanity — that the gains reached from the stars will trickle down to the rest of us in the years and generations to come — and yet our recent history tells us this has not been the case.

Progress can be a very dubious word. Technological optimism comes with it a refusal to address the morality and politics of technological developments. Most tech is at best value-neutral, with people being able to repurpose it for both “good” and “bad.”

The Wright Brothers, for example, famously pitched that planes would bring about an end to all war because scouts would be able to detect advancing armies and halt their approach. Less than three decades later, bombers were used to level countless cities and towns worldwide in WWII. “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth,” said inventor Orville Wright shortly before his death in 1948, “But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end." When we only are willing to discuss the good that can come from technology, we become blindsided by its more terrible effects.

The Tech Industry was likewise portrayed during the last decade as a force for good, “disrupting” sectors of the economy such as media and transportation to better the consumer and society. However, this portrayal flattened all criticisms as either advancing technology or halting it, even when that tech was as ridiculous as a $400 juicer or as malicious as an all-encompassing surveillance system. It allowed tech companies to rebrand practices such as wage theft and union-busting as innovative when, really, they were taking advantage of gaps in the law, as well as precarious insecurity in the labor market, to extract wealth. As Nitasha Tiku wrote in Wired:

“It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction — -of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.”

When men of industry talk about space, they often do so with the same deceptive branding of progress. The kings of Silicon Valley often see our expansion into the stars almost as a prophecy. When Jeff Bezos spoke in 2016 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, he framed space travel as an ultimatum, saying, “We need to go into space if we want to continue to have a growing civilization.”

These men are confident in a future that has not yet come to pass. They speak of the Earth’s destruction without space travel as a near certainty, which is an ethically fraught thing to do for the people directly responsible for how our planet’s policies are shaped. By framing leaving the Earth as something that must and will happen, these men never have to contemplate whether they should or even if they have the right to — it simply is.

They use the mythos of technological optimism to avoid responsibility, so they can instead fantasize about being masters in space.

Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have desired to go into space for decades, if not their entire lives. Bezos allegedly once considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com after the catchphrase of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard. Elon Musk once said in an interview that he wants to make “Starfleet happen.” It’s clear from multiple interviews that the technological aesthetic of that future has inspired them greatly in their work.

However, these two men run businesses that, while technologically impressive, are utterly divorced from the egalitarian principles the Star Trek universe claims to represent. It’s doubtful that the Federation (i.e., the main polity in the Star Trek franchise) would approve of the union-busting and hazardous working conditions present in both of their businesses. The progress narrative is something they cling to as a rationalization. If men like Jeff Bezos truly want to create a solar system with “a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einstein’s,” then we need more housing, food, education, and healthcare on Earth, not more spaceships.

The part of the Star Trek mythos that Silicon Valley kings want to replicate is not the Earth of the Federation — which is a democratic, post-scarcity society that has long moved past capitalism — but rather the endless exploration and conquest of space. When Marketplace asked Elon Musk to provide the reason for why we should go to space, it ultimately came down to excitement:

“…if you think about and sort of look ahead and see about a future where we’re out there exploring the stars and understanding the universe and the kind of things that you see in science fiction books and movies and reading books; that’s an exciting future and much more exciting than one where we’re just forever confined to Earth until our eventual extinction.”

Note that he’s not really talking about saving humanity — that’s simply the feel-good finish that’s put in a TedTalk presentation. The thing we should focus on here is this desire to explore the unknown and to make it your own. While that may sound harmless, the idea of laying claim to the frontier is a narrative that historically has had a very racialized and imperialist tinge to it.

When Europeans came to the “New World,” they found a continent ravished by the diseases they brought with them. We will never know the exact number of Native Americans that existed here before the European conquest. Still, some estimates place it as high as 112 million in 1492, with 90% succumbing to diseases by the time we reach 1650. European settlers conquered the lands on this slightly less occupied continent, and overtime, pre-First Contact America became reimagined by many white Americans as a pristine wildland untouched by man. As John Bakeless wrote erroneously in his book The Eyes of Discovery (1950): “the land seemed empty to invaders who came from settled Europe…that ancient, primeval, undisturbed wilderness.”

Of course, this perception was untrue with millions of Native Americans still existing on the continent, many of which became violently displaced in the process of Westward “expansion,” but that was not how countless White Americans portrayed their exploitation of this place. Many believed they had a God-given right or a “Manifest Destiny” to expand westward. Public figures such as President James Monroe made it a matter of US policy, addressing to Congress in 1823 that the US would “consider any attempt [by a European power] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

The continent of North America was the U.S.A’s to claim, and the U.S.A’s alone.

The cultural hero often seen depicted in this era was the cowboy, which, although based on a far-less glamorous, far-more diverse profession, has since been reimagined to be a white savior whose job was to create order in a lawless, savage land. Cowboys were played by men like John Wayne, who made a career portraying gunmen who protected white Americans from the outlaws and Indians “occupying” the West. The movie Stagecoach (1939) ends in a climactic battle where our white protagonists, led by John Wayne, have to shoot down attacking Apache forces until the U.S. Calvery ultimately saves them.

As a people, we never lost sight of the idea that exploration requires wiping away old paradigms and people to claim something as “new.” When we think of Space exploration, our go-to heroes are often captains such as Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) in Firefly (2002) or the rogue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in Star Wars (1977)— all of which are updated Cowboy archetypes that spend their time with bounty hunters or making deals in futuristic, yet retro-looking saloons.

Similarly, back before the Mariner 4 flyby in 1964 revealed Mars to be a dead world, it was widely speculated that it was teeming with life. Some scientists even believed that Mar’s color on the infrared spectrum mimicked that of vegetation. This captured the popular imagination, and we were bombarded with stories of a lawless landscape tamed through brave exploration. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter franchise, for example, was about the titular hero and his adventures on Mars as a heroic warlord. The late 40s and early 50s were likewise littered with Mars-themed B-movies such as Invaders from Mars (1953) and Battle Beyond the Sun (1959).

Our evolving understanding of space has made it seem colder and less vibrant than our image of the cosmos sixty years ago. Still, that spirit of conquest and limitless possibility remains. Admirers of space no longer talk as much about encountering alien life, but, instead, how they can shape the vastness of space to their dominion. When, for example, Jeff Bezos laid out his vision for building out O’Neil colonies throughout the solar system — basically gigantic space stations with independent ecosystems — he talked less about how to create an ideal society and far more about how that environment would be shaped, saying:

“…these are really pleasant places to live. Some of these O’Niel colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities….These are ideal climates. These are shirt sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day. All year long. No rain. No storms. No earthquakes…”

Much has been written about how rich Tech entrepreneurs are attempting to buy themselves a segregated society in the stars — away from our deteriorating planet's dangers. There may be some truth to that worry, but ultimately it’s far easier to build a bunker underground in New Zealand than it is to jumpstart a delicate, spinning deathtrap in space.

This is about control.

Space, by its very nature, must be a heavily regulated environment. The void is dangerous, and one poorly planned decision can lead to people being jettisoned to their deaths. Everything from the water these future citizens consume to their air they breathe will be tracked and logged by necessity. Every move a person makes can easily be monitored because, unlike on Earth, there is no elsewhere to run off to.

Space is also simultaneously lawless in the sense that the governments and regulations of Earth are very far away. All laws are only enforceable as far as your employer or owner wishes to acknowledge them. It’s an inherently authoritarian environment as citizens are now under the whim of someone who can rightly define dissent as illegality. In this situation, the outlaw isn’t some mercenary alien or rogue AI, but any person threatening the delicate ecosystem the rich control, as all challenges can be conflated into existential threats.

Space offers the rich the final frontier of ultimate control.

Tech heroes love to talk about Science Fiction. They gush about Star Trek and Star Wars and how that technology is just within reach. They claim it's our right to expand outwards into the stars. They tell us that we will be there soon— if only we give them the reins to get us there. However, when we look at those futures more closely, it doesn’t always bode well for the humans left stranded on Earth.

In science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the Earth is a radioactive backwater that has long been abandoned for newer and better colonies. The planet has fallen so far into obscurity that no one in the galactic community even remembers that it’s the origin of humanity. The twenty million or so people who continue to live here endure increasingly harsh circumstances, with all citizens undergoing mandatory euthanasia by the age of sixty.

The idea of having to abandon Earth is a common one in science fiction: in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, the planet is thought to be uninhabitable; Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Saga takes place millions of years after catastrophic wars caused humanity to flee the Sol system; in the cult classic Firefly our planet is referred to as the Earth That Was. The prevailing narrative in the cultural zeitgeist is that we will eventually destroy this planet and will have to spread ourselves into the ever-expanding void of space to survive.

As someone living on Earth, this template has me quite concerned. It might seem as though this essay is trying to dissuade you from supporting space travel, but this is not a call for technological pessimism anymore than it’s an endorsement of blind optimism. We very well could reach for the stars in a responsible and good way for the majority of humanity, but that would involve caring about the policies used to shape that future. It would involve looking to shows like Star Trek for more than just their ship designs.

The Federation did not achieve a peaceful polity through Faster Than Light travel (known as warp on the show). It started when the creator of the warp drive, scientist Zefram Cochrane, chose to peacefully make First Contact with the alien race, the Vulcans. Even before the invention of transporters or replicators, Earth expanded the Federation by prizing policy that uplifted peace and exploration over cold, merciless value extraction.

That world is also within our reach.

If we want Earth to be like the Federation and not like the radioactive wasteland in the Foundation or the abandoned surface of Dune, then we will have to prioritize the Federation’s goals. It will not only mean setting the opinions of men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk aside (and redistributing their wealth and influence to more people) but also creating a world where everyone has the potential to be an Einstein or Mozart, not just a couple thousand.

We all have the potential to be extraordinary, not only a few rich men struggling for control.

Alex Has Opinions 12/14/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/14/20

The Men Who Sold the False Hope of Stimulus Checks

Online influencers who cashed in on people’s fear and desperation

When the pandemic hit America in March, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to assist the millions of Americans and businesses facing hardships due to the ensuing recession. The law, among other things, set aside grant money for small businesses, temporarily increased unemployment benefits, as well as distributed a one-time stimulus check of $1,200 to all Americans earning under $75,000 a year.

Since the passage of the CARES act, no new major relief has come on the federal level. It’s become a meme at this point for commentators to remark that Americans were only left with less than $5 a day to get through both a recession and a pandemic (that figure comes from $1,200 divided by the number of days since March 27th, 2020). People are desperate. Millions of Americans having already lost their jobs and their homes — many facing rampant food insecurity or worse.

Sadly, this desperation has given rise to a cottage industry of online influencers who promise “updates” on a second stimulus check that, until very recently, had little chance of being passed. Americans might finally get a second relief package this winter — an effort long overdue — but we should pause and reflect on the men who took advantage of that hope for ad revenue.

It’s important to note that there have been several moments during these past nine months, specifically during July and early October, where negotiations between Congressional Democrats and Republicans were ongoing. The early October negotiations, in particular, briefly had people somewhat hopeful. In late September, Nancy Pelosi remarked that she believed an agreement was possible, which made people think relief was finally on its way.

These moments, however, always had deep ideologically and political hurdles to overcome. The first package was passed under the threat of tanking the entire economy, and without that same incentive, negotiations stalled. As we got increasingly close to November, it became clear that lawmakers preferred to settle the matter until after the election. This outcome was tragically always a high possibility. As the staff of Radio.com hypothesized all the way back in May:

“For now, the status of whether Americans will receive a second stimulus check is up in the air. If a second wave of relief does come to pass, it might not be soon enough for the Americans who are facing down bills, mortgages, and more.”

If you were active on the Internet during this time, though, that might not have been the impression you received. There were scores of YouTubers and other influencers who captured a lot of traffic by making hundreds of videos, all promising to have a vital update on a second stimulus check that would never arrive.

“Minutes ago,” begins YouTuber Kevin Paffrath in a video posted to their channel Meet Kevin “the president has just met with Mark Meadows, and treasury secretary Mnuchin…Donald Trump has apparently, allegedly…approved a revised package and he would like to do a deal.” Kevin goes on to say that “this is incredible,” and while he doesn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, you can sense the excitement in his voice. “This is not a bad progression,” he exclaims while holding up a stuffed animal of the Super Mario Star.

For context, this video was released on October 9th, several days after the President, over Twitter, scuttled weeks of negotiations that had gone into a second relief package. Trump then suddenly reversed this decision on the 9th by offering the $1.8 trillion counteroffer Kevin is referring to. Still, the deal would not go anywhere because the President neglected to get buy-in from either party. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alleged that the offer failed to address key policy concerns (and was reportedly peeved at how Trump had ruined earlier negotiations). Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, were uncomfortable with the larger price tag.

A cursory search online would have told the influencer that we were not close at that time, but that apparently doesn’t soak in the eyeballs, or in Mr. Paffrath’s case, the affiliate marketing. While he has been doing some notable fundraising on his platform (a portion of his ad revenue for stimulus videos allegedly goes to the nonprofit No Kid Hungry), he also spends a lot of his time plugging links to applications such as Webull, encouraging viewers, many of whom seem to be there because they are desperate, to drop $100 to get free stock. He also offers online classes on his website that begin in the $300 range and go upwards to nearly $6,000, which is not affordable for a group of people desperate for another $1,200 check.

Mr. Paffrat has done at least one of these videos per day since mid-April, making a minimum of 235 and counting. They have all been a variation of the same theme: they take an inconsequential update from a public figure and inflate its importance. If reporting from CNBC is accurate, this has made him a fortune. He’s on track to make millions this year from his YouTube channel, and this is not a hustle that he is the only one doing.

Another YouTuber engaged in this activity is Brian Kim, an accountant belonging to the tax preparation business Clear Value. At one million subscribers, his YouTube Channel similarly puts out a minimum of one video per day about the possibility of a second stimulus check. This content likewise exaggerates updates about policy and commentary. “This has a high probability of passing because the Democrats always want to include more people into the recipients of the stimulus checks,” Kim said in a video on July 26th about Congressional Republican’s introduction of a $1 trillion COVID-19 aid package.

As with the situation in October, though, the path forward for adoption was not as straight forward as Kim implied in this video. There were serious disagreements with Republicans and Democrats about both the package's cost (the Democrats were at the time shooting for $3 trillion) and about the policy inside it. The Republicans, for example, were insistent that employers have something called a “liability shield,” which would give employers immunity from Coronavirus-related lawsuits. The President also pushed to remove or cut the payroll tax, which earned him criticism from members inside his own party.

Again, all of this information was readily available at the time online.

Kim does not have affiliate links or classes to plug. Still, he is making these videos on behalf of his tax preparation business, which means they all serve as an implicit, albeit less direct, advertisement for Clear Value. His videos can get views in the hundreds of thousands, and undoubtedly some of that attention has translated to added business.

It cannot be overstated how many influencers are engaged in this game. They range from larger players such as Kevin Paffrath (Meet Kevin) and Brian Kim (Clear Value) to smaller outfits we haven’t yet talked about like David Clark (The TEC Show) and Michael Wrubel — the latter of who also plugs the stock app Webull.

These products are ultimately being marketed to people who need financial relief, not stock advice. “This is crazy….weve waited long enough for a stimulus. I just lost my daughter and have to make a Christmas for my 2 year old grandaughter (s.p.). How am I supposed to do that without a stimulus?” remarks one user under one of Michael Wrubel’s videos. “Right now, I am still barely able to pay my rent. I pray that rental/mortgage relief is granted for those who are very close to being homeless. Praying 🙏🙏🙏,” writes another in a Meet Kevin video.

It’s a desperation that these influencers are well aware of and occasionally admit to in those fleeting moments of honesty they have with their viewers. As YouTuber Stephen Gardner told viewers in his December 9th video: “Here in my community, I know people that would really really love to get a stimulus check. I know others that follow me because they really need unemployment [benefits].”

Yet this honesty never led anywhere. Their viewers watched in the hope that this information would give them more than simply false hope, yet it never came.

The trend we see here of influencers taking advantage of people’s desperation for fame and fortune deserves the utmost scrutiny. There is a difference between reporting on the stimulus negotiations happening in Congress and taking advantage of people’s misery.

News outlets and commentators followed the negotiations' ups and downs because they were (and continue to be) important. Congress’s failure to provide Americans true relief has led to millions of Americans losing their businesses, jobs, homes, and for far too many, their lives. Honest reporting told people how far away our leaders were from providing them relief from that suffering, even when it was frustrating. They focused on the reasons that made a second stimulus package’s passage so difficult (e.g., electoral politics and ideological differences).

The men who preached stimulus updates on the Internet could have done that as well. They could have said that a second stimulus was months away. They maybe could have even scrutinized the specific political leaders who held up negotiations and told their followers to bother them.

Instead, they instructed cash-strapped viewers to buy stock and to sign up for get-rich classes they couldn’t afford, and we should never forget it.

Alex Has Opinions 12/9/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/9/20

PS5 Scalpers & the Bots People Hate

Gamers’ hell today might be shoppers’ nightmare tomorrow

(This story was originally published on Medium).

Sony’s PlayStation 5 hit stores on November 12, 2020, and yet many customers have struggled to obtain a console for themselves. Retailers across the planet have been releasing steady opportunities for customers to purchase one. Still, despite this steady trickle of supply, consumers have experienced by crashing home pages, glitched carts, and in some cases, long nights in line during the height of a pandemic.

Part of this delay has to do with the novelty of the situation. A new console has only been released roughly every seven years, with the PlayStation 4 first dropping in the US on November 15, 2013. The coronavirus pandemic created a time where many people are stuck at home wanting something to do, leading to a massive demand for the console. There were over one million global pre-orders placed before the product even launched.

Overwhelmingly, though, the number one complaint that has surfaced is not of too much demand, but that “scalpers,” people who purchase scarce products in bulk and then sell them at a marked-up price, have been using automated scripts or “bots” to constrain supply. Comments decrying scalpers have garnered wide reactions all across the web. In one of several instances, it was speculated that a scalper was robbed at gunpoint during a sale in Toronto, Canada.

This bot crisis is emotionally pressing because many people are stuck inside and are looking for escapism. Still, it’s also part of a longstanding problem plaguing the retail space for a while now. The world of online shopping has become like the Wild West for those with the programming know-how and the willingness to seize it.

When we start to explore the world of online scalping, the first thing that becomes apparent is how brazen many people are with this activity. There was another internet rumor, first seen on the discussion forum GameFaqs, that one user named M (we are omitting their name for privacy) was also robbed at gunpoint for bragging about their huge haul of PS5’s on social media with the caption “f@ck your feelings.”

They allegedly failed to conceal their location in the picture’s metadata, or, in another telling, bragged about where they lived, and someone allegedly came to their house and robbed them, also at gunpoint.

This story has not been substantiated, and as far as we know, it's another example of internet telephone (though similar cases have been reported in Chicago and New York).

Still, the idea that a scalper would brag about their haul of goods is quite believable because many of the most successful ones do it all the time. The YouTuber Gunner Tierno has an entire channel dedicated to botting goods online. In a camo hoodie and sunglasses, they tell users in their November 19th video on botting the newest generations of consoles that in the latest restock, he “…got seven X-boxes on [Walmart’s website] and…one PS5.”

Tierno is hardly an exception to this game — though he is one of the few willing to show his face online. A quick YouTube search shows dozens of influencers trying to gain clout by instructing viewers on how to buy a new console.

For example, a video put out by Andrew2007 on November 11th — the day before the PS5 launched — has over 150,000 viewers, and that attention is hardly a rarity. “We’ve done it again…members have secured another 2000 consoles in the past 48 hours,” bragged the group CrepChiefNotify to their followers on Instagram. Nearly 400 liked it, and the account has over 30,000 followers.

Most of these influencers are pretty adamant that they are doing nothing wrong, with opinions ranging from “look how awesome I am” to “well someone’s going to do it.” As YouTuber Mr. Pr33m told viewers in their November 21st video:

“I know many people are getting mad at people using bots, which totally makes sense…obviously in a perfect world nobody uses bots and nobody resells it. But that’s just not the case…if you want the PS5 to play or to sell, you’re gonna have to do your best, and everything you can to buy it, or else you’re just not going to.”

This attitude can occasionally be a detriment to some of the more vocal scalper communities. When CrepChiefNotify, for example, publically bragged about those 2,500 PS5’s for resale, telling people that “reselling isn’t going away,” it generated an intense backlash from the gaming community. When the group tried to create a similar order of over 1,000 Xbox Series X consoles a couple of days later, they were denied by the retailer Very due to “technical difficulties.”

With these short-lived victories aside, groups like CrepChiefNotify are correct that reselling will probably continue for the foreseeable future. This practice is not illegal, and retailers have so far shown little incentive to constrain bot usage on their end.

Online retailers may have taken some simple steps, such as limiting traffic from a single IP address. Still, such solutions have easy workarounds like IP Proxies that even novices can implement.

The developers behind the bot CandyPreme 2.0, for example, have a Beginner Guide that is very user friendly. When that fails, most scalpers belong to “cook groups,” which are online forums (e.g., typically discord or slack channels) that share the latest information and strategies.

Scalper groups may be annoying to the consumer, but, arguably, they are not detrimental to the original brands they resell. The scalpers we are referring to here are often tied to the acquisition of luxury goods, especially sneakers and tickets.

When you examine what most cook groups bought before Sony and Microsoft released the latest generation of consoles, they were overwhelmingly devoted to self-proclaimed “sneakerheads,” using bots to snag shoes such as Air Jordans. AIObot, for example, is specifically devoted to corning the market on rare sneakers and has a logo of a robot carrying a shoe.

These luxury brands ultimately benefit from scalpers because they are not trying to sell through quantity alone, but instead from the price markup that comes with prestige. Sneakerheads bring with them fervent demand, and Nike makes the object of their obsession a rarity by constricting supply.

Companies such as Nike could stop scalping by merely increasing the supply of their limited editions to make the markup less desirable, but in many ways, that’s beside the point. Fans are paying for the allure of scarcity (real or imagined), and they are using bots to do it. As Felix Salmon writes in Splinter:

“…Nike knows better than anybody that use of bots is a sign of fandom. Show me a fan who managed to get his hands on one of these sneakers at launch, directly from the website, and I’ll show you a fan who used a bot.…Nike could put the bots out of business tomorrow, if it wanted — and so when it attacks them with mere words, that’s a clear sign that the company is actually OK with their existence.”

The same can be said of next-generation consoles. The early adoption of consoles is a difficult process. They are notoriously released with many bugs and few exclusive titles, which, if current reporting is to be believed, remains true with the PS5 as well. Players are not obtaining a PS5 due to it being an optimal gaming experience — that’s months, if not years away — but for the prestige of having the thing before everyone else.

Even if retailers are not getting the profit from a scalper’s resale, they still benefit from increased anticipation and demand. When the market rate for a console online is $1000, you will think the retail rate of $399 for the digital (and $499 for the hard disk) is a steal by comparison.

The press generated over its perceived scarcity might have even piqued your interest in it in the first place. As one frustrated shopper, who was unable to secure one of two PS5’s at a California GameStop during Black Friday, told ABC News: “…there’s a huge craze, people are fighting and murdering each other, everyone’s going crazy. And then all of a sudden: Media! Press! Free advertising for this console.”

We could not find any occurrences of someone in the U.S. being killed over a PS5 sale, but the frustration in that statement, though maybe not the reality, is clearly felt by consumers. People are frustrated by the constraint in supply, and the majority of that hatred has fallen on scalpers. While men such as Tierno like to style themselves as slick entrepreneurs or even self-proclaimed Robin Hoods, the dominant narrative is that they are to blame.

The scalping craze with consoles may have hit the news with the PS5, but it actually started months earlier with the Nintendo Switch in April. When millions of Americans lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 recession, thousands flocked to the reselling space to supplement their income.

The beginning of the pandemic created a huge demand for entertainment. Reporting from Vice indicates that an emerging community used a bot called Bird Bot to snag Nintendo Switches and resell them at a markup, sometimes even relying on their stimulus checks for liquid capital.

As of right now, this field is largely focused on reselling high-end luxury goods and electronics such as sneakers, next-generation consoles, and graphic cards. These goods may be necessary for a minority of professions, but they are not essential for most Americans. It’s an annoyance (in some cases, one perpetuated by some truly desperate people) that most consumers will be able to wait out.

However, we are quickly entering a space where bots could potentially hamper people’s access to things such as food and healthcare. When, for example, developers released add-ons in April that allowed people to secure timeslots for grocery or meal delivery services, there was widespread concern that these tools would be abused.

It was straightforward to see how people could take advantage of these bots and make booking appointments more costly for those who don’t have the technical expertise or resources to use them. As Joseph Cox wrote in a separate article for Vice:

“Some of those most at risk of the coronavirus, such as the eldery, who are staying inside and may need to use food delivery services are not going to be able to use bots or scripts to help them order food, or even know that this is a technical possibility. Instead, these bots may disproportionately benefit those who do have the technical know-how to do so, leaving others behind.”

As essential services become more online — both because of COVID and due to our world’s increasingly interconnected nature — scalping might turn into price gouging. We could be headed for a world where firing up a bot becomes the cost of doing business online, but that terrifying future remains within the realm of conjecture. Its inevitability or avoidance will depend on the practices of businesses, consumers, and governments.

Alex Has Opinions 12/3/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/3/20

The Rise & Fall of Evil Paddington

The Twitter handle that blew up & the company that ignored it.

(This story was originally published on Medium).

“oh btw pay no mind to that person in my basement. i took care of them,” tweeted out Evil Paddington on November 23, 2020. In another tweet, they would later clarify that by took care of, they meant murder.

The account, which is run by actress Elsie K. Fisher, tweeted out dozens of similar comments, many of which earned tens of thousands of likes in a matter of hours. This humorous bit may seem like some harmless fun (and it is). Still, the tweets also signify a much larger pattern of a parody account using the clout of another brand to up their engagement while that original brand sits cluelessly on the sidelines.

Fisher was parodying the character Paddington: The sweet bear that was first introduced in the Paddington book series by writer Michael Bond and later made even more popular by StudioCanal’s 2014 and 2017 movies. Paddington's persona is that of an overly saccharine bear who solves his problems through kindness. His mantra to the world is that “if we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.”

This affable personality is rumored to extend to their official Twitter account as well, where an allegedly leaked image of their guidelines instructs posters to avoid cursing, to not talk about politics, and never to insinuate that Paddington doesn’t actually like marmalade. A typical Paddington Bear tweet is of “innocent” things such as the question, “Shall I have a sprinkling of pumpkin spice or cinnamon on my hot cocoa this afternoon?”

It seemed only natural that this brand would eventually be subverted — this is the Internet after all — and soon Elsie K. Fisher of “Eighth Grade” (2018) fame spent the day of November 23 posting expletives and political statements in direct contrast to the alleged guidelines. “the k in my follower count stands for kill,” they tweeted sardonically.

Some people loved the tweets calling them the funniest thing they’ve seen, while others were upset that it disrupted their image of the Paddington brand. As Twitter user Grogu Lucas claimed of their mother’s reaction: “This is horrible. Absolutely not okay. No. No no. Paddington is a nice boy!!”

Ultimately, Elsie K. Fisher would ax the Evil Paddington persona a day later, uploading a facetious in memoriam of all her best tweets as the personality, but not before upping her follower account in the thousands, possibly even in the tens of thousands. According to the Wayback Machine, her follower account was sitting above 43,000 followers in mid-October and jumped up to nearly 74,000 followers on November 24 — the day they retired the Evil Paddington bit.

Parody accounts are not new on Twitter and have been well-documented. Nihilist Arby’s (founded in 2015), for example, is an account dedicated to making unruly humor while pretending to be an official Arby’s handle. In a tweet made on June 24, they joked about how a recent protest had burned down an Arby’s, writing: “Hi everyone. How’s the week going? pls enjoy burning the arbys.”

Elsie K. Fisher’s Evil Paddington replicated a very similar type of humor, except her bit was only for a brief period of time. She monetized the attention coming from the leaked slideshow for all its worth by creating some funny, albeit narrowly focused, content.

There is a term for a small-scale brand in business that only applies to a narrow scope of people — it’s called a “micro-brand.” This term has traditionally been used to refer to high-end products such as watches that only have a limited customer base. However, the rise of micro-targeting through social media has allowed any good to be marketed as a micro-brand, and that applies especially to IP. Twitter is filled with people adopting fake personas that only fill a small niche and then dropping them the moment they outlive their usefulness.

Sometimes these brands are serious. It’s quite common for people to change the name of their profile to reflect the latest moment in politics or the news. Following the death of George Floyd, many users, for example, added the phrase “Black Lives Matter” to their handles. The same can be seen with many conservative influencers who in the 2020 election cycle added the phrase “Stop The Steal” to their handles, which was in reference to their so-far unsubstantiated belief that Joe Biden has stolen the election.

Often, however, these microbrands are on the funnier side. Another common trend during the most recent election was for users to claim they represented “The John Wilkes Booth Project.” This naming scheme was not glorifying the assassin of the United States’ 16th president, but rather parodying the bipartisan “Lincoln Project,” which was a political action committee aimed at stoping the reelection of Donald Trump.

These microbrands are notoriously short-lived, but they can be extended when the parody account receives attention from the original IP. In the case of Evil Paddington, the original Paddington brand (owned by Vivendi) did not interact with them, and they have so far not responded to any of our requests for comment. However, it’s not uncommon for major brands to engage with parody handles or stan accounts to make a story go viral.

When Nihilist Arby’s was hacked in 2018, for example, the company used their contacts in Twitter to assist the profile owner, Brendan Kelly, in getting control of their account again. It earned the company a lot of good press and positive engagement that is hard to purchase from advertising alone.

From this perspective, the Paddington brand’s refusal to engage with Evil Paddington seems like a missed opportunity. One comment from their evil counterpoint garnered over 100,000 likes, which is well above the engagement the Paddington account manages to achieve in a typical month or even the last six months combined.

The differing tones of these two accounts probably generated a fair amount of hesitancy from the brand manager, but with that indecision came lost engagement as well as a missed chance to preach the “kindness through adversity” doctrine that Paddington is all about. It’s so rare for a company to be able to talk about kindness and for it actually to be on-brand.

The fact that Vivendi missed this moment speaks to the priorities (or lack thereof) that exist among many of our favorite brands.

Alex Has Opinions 11/16/20 Alex Has Opinions 11/16/20

Gently Ripping Apart ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’

Just a click to the left and the queer classic unravels

(This story was originally published on Medium).
I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in high school as a closeted queer. I did so at the dead of night on the family computer. It was one of those films I would secretly watch over and over again. I loved it all — the outfits, the songs, the red lipstick. I was enamored with the villain Dr. Frank-N-Furter (played by Tim Curry) as they terrorized a suburban straight, white couple out of their heterosexuality. It was a powerful experience for me, one of many on my gradual road towards recognizing my own gender dysphoria.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not so much a movie as it is a phenomenon. The campy science fiction musical has been a facet of queer culture since the late 1970s. The movie and the play, the latter of which is referred to as The Rocky Horror Show, have had a deep impact on pop culture. The movie has enjoyed repeated midnight showing for over forty years, and unlike a lot of cult classics, it is one surrounded by audience participation and ritual.

As LGBTQIA+ representation has increased, people have started to criticize this movie’s more problematic elements. Dr. Frank-N-Furter has started to be seen less as a figure of sexual awakening and exploration. Instead, he falls more into a larger trope of trans “deviancy” that ties directly into decades of discrimination on the Silver Screen and off.

The world of Rocky Horror clearly matters to many people, and this appreciation has much to do with its context. The original play came about in London in 1973, when there wasn’t as much acceptance for either LGBTQIA+ people or sexual empowerment. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized in either the US or the UK until the 2010s, and the concept of monogamy was very much the dominant cultural narrative (and remains so today).

The Rocky Horror Show cut across these tensions by boldly talking about sex and queerness — all within a fun, campy package that satirized the B-movies of the 1950s. Many of the songs were overtly sexual in a way that doesn’t blame the characters for “giving in to temptation.” Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), a straightlaced couple from the burbs, each have their own sexual awakenings that remain intact by the time the film closes. “Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me, I wanna be dirty,” belts out Susan Sarandon in the middle of the film, advocating for an assertive form of sexuality that was by no means commonplace in 70s America.

Also, the film has a lot of subtle and not so subtle nods to queer culture. When the character Rocky (Peter Hinwood) and Dr. Frank-N-Furter go to “bed” for the first time, wedding bells ring in the background. The idea of same-sex marriage was not widely accepted in America during this time. In the 1972 case, Baker v. Nelson, Americans Mr. Baker and Mr. McConnell infamously had their application for marriage rejected by the Supreme Court in a one-sentence dismissal. It would take decades for same-sex marriage to receive political recognition, making the allusion to queer marriage in Rocky Horror a radical act for the time.

There is also Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who is first introduced to the audience as a bold, gender non-conforming individual in the song Sweet Transvestite, singing “I’m just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.” Dr. Frank-N-Furter's unabashed confidence was, at the time, a rare type of representation for a trans character in mass media. Their commanding presence made them a fixture in pop culture that many people have since wanted to replicate. As trans writer Alice Collins wrote in Bloody Disgusting of their own experience with Rocky Horror:

“The first depiction of a trans person I ever saw was Frank. I never thought they were freaky or weird. They looked like fun, and I enjoyed that they didn’t care what anyone else thought and how they were unabashedly themselves. I thought it was so cool and wanted to be like that: giving zero cares as to what anyone thought of me. It gave me strength to grow a thicker skin and try more things out of the ordinary; I looked up to Frank. For the longest time before seeing the movie I’d always wished I could switch between gender at will and it was really cool to see someone who could at least on the surface do so before my eyes.”

The text was something countless queer people gravitated towards, and that sense of belonging created a safe space for some members of the LGBTQIA+ community. While the film initially flopped, it became a cult hit shared in Midnight showings across America. People regularly attended screenings where audience members spoke back to the characters on the screen. It was also common for fans to cosplay as their favorites. Rocky Horror acting troupes likewise formed with the job of repeating the dialogue of the characters' on-screen. This further facilitated a conversation between the audience and the film.

This festive veneer gave people social permission to dress up in gender-nonconforming clothing, a rarity in US culture outside of Halloween. As Larry Viezel, president of The Rocky Horror Picture Show Official Fan Club told the BBC:

“I know of a lot of people whose lives were saved by this movie. Especially for those in the LGBT community, it’s a place where they could be themselves and find people who were their family. I don’t want to give that up. I want people to still have a place to be.”

For the longest time, there were many parts of the country where this ephemeral production was one of the only queer spaces that existed. For example, I went to a college in upstate New York, where the nearest queer bar was a fifty-minute drive away. Still, every month the local movie theater would put on a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was much more accessible to me. That was in the 2010s, and this sentiment only held more true in the 80s and 90s.

I think it would be shorted-sighted to dismiss these spaces when they have been key in helping many people assert their identities. This fact is especially true when the LGBTQIA+ community has traditionally had so few non-bar-related scenes for queer people to explore.

Simultaneously, however, we must recognize that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a flawless text. It’s a wholly transphobic movie, and many people have felt excluded from it rather than accepted.

Rocky Horror relies on a lot of cultural touchstones that are antiquated to many of us now. Some of these still linger in the cultural memory, such as drive-in movie theaters (i.e., the song Science Fiction/Double Feature) or how Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s name is a reference to a movie theater hotdog.

Other references, though, don’t land anymore. When Dr. Frank-N-Furter unveils his creation Rocky — a muscular man he Frankensteined together through “science” — he tells his guests that Rocky has “the Charles Atlas seal of approval.” This was in reference to a real-life bodybuilder of the same name. Frank-N-Furter then sings an entire song (i.e., I Can Make You a Man) that lampoons the body-builders exercise program adverts. Although well understood to the viewers of the 70s, this reference doesn't make sense to the modern-day viewer.

Part of this slapdash of memes has to do with the fact that the movie’s writer, Richard O’Brien, really was not trying to make a serious plot. He created several of the play’s songs first and then organized a plot around them with stage director and friend Jim Sharman. O’Brien retrospectively admits he drew heavily upon pastiches of US Pop culture.

Some of these tropes, however, were far more insidious than the satirizing of old commercials. One of the biggest problematic tropes in the film has to do with consent, which at the time had just started to enter the popular lexicon. The year The Rocky Horror Picture Show aired, the concept of “date rape” entered the national conversation via Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. It would not be until 1993 that marital rape became a crime in every state in the Union. This cruel reality meant that it wasn’t considered unusual in the 1970s for consent to be murky in US pop culture and real-life (side note — most of history has been garbage).

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a product of its time in the sense that it often lacked consent in many of its scenes. For example, Brad and Janet first come to Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s castle to use the doctor’s telephone, and instead, he has them stripped down to their undergarments. Brad “decides” to accept this situation, but only as a transactional means to an end.

Later, the mad scientist separately visits both Brad and Janet in bed under the guise of pretending to be the other’s partner. He effectively tricks each member of the couple into having sex with him, and although they do later consent, the initial engagement is quite predatory. This point is particularly troublesome as Trans people are often falsely accused of “trapping” their partners into a sexual relationship.

Frank-N-Furter’s relationship with Rocky is likewise extremely problematic. Rocky is born halfway through the film and is only 7 hours old by the movie's end. He only has “part” of a human brain and moves throughout the world in a child-like way. The power dynamic of a creator and their created makes it inappropriate for Frank-N-Furter to bed Rocky under any circumstances, but Rocky’s young mindset makes their relationship borderline pedophilic. Again, conservatives frequently conflate transgender people with pedophilia. As recently as this year, conservative political activist Angela Stanton-King tweeted about how she believes the LGBTQ community “sexualizes children.”

These tropes in Rocky Horror are hurtful because there is a long, bitter history of depicting gender-nonconforming people in pop culture (and in real life) as deviants and even murderers. Some of this legacy goes back to the Hays Codes, which was a policy that sanitized American media and, among many other things, prevented LGBTQIA+ people from being portrayed positively in films. Queer people were often cast as the villains, such as Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960). Even after the code was axed in 1968, these tropes continued in texts such as Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).

As a predatory, cannibalistic murderer, Frank-N-Furter definitely fits into this mold, and this representation did hurt people. As Caelyn Sandel wrote in The Mary Sue on their feelings of seeing Rocky Horror:

“That’s not what young-me saw when I looked at Frank and characters like him. I saw a cruel, unapologetic gender-nonconforming person, grossly over-sexualized and inconsiderate to others, and I said, I can’t try to be a woman — people will think I’m him.”

This is by no means a minority opinion, with dozens of writers making similar statements throughout the years. It’s great that so many queer Rocky Horror fans were able to carve out space for themselves with this film, but we have to recognize that the text itself was not always the shining beacon of progress that we imagined it to be.

Writer Richard O’Brien wrote Rocky Horror as someone with a fair amount of privilege. While his text has reverberated with many people with gender dysphoria, his own position is rather dismissive of gender identity. When asked in 2016 of their opinion of Germaine Greer’s anti-trans comments, they said:

“…feminists [who] say that because someone has surgery that doesn’t make them a woman…I think I agree with that. I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries. You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman.”

O’Brien, who describes themselves as third gender, then goes on to explain that binary trans people are “in the middle” of the gender spectrum. This comment was supposed to be comforting to fans, but ends up sounding detached and somewhat cruel. Again, these comments were made in 2016. In 1975 — an age far less progressive than today — it’s doubtful that a not-yet-out O’Brien put as much sensitivity into making the original Rocky Horror Show.

The film certainly created a space for LGBTQIA+ people, but I am not convinced that the original text was intended as such in all the ways it is remembered. There is a lot of ink spilled on this film’s queer subtext. Some of it seems genuine, such as Frank-N-Futer’s lab coat, which has a pink triangle on it, symbolizing the persecution of queer people during the Holocaust.

Yet, some of this imagery may have just been coincidental. The birth of the character Rocky, for example, takes place inside a vat Dr. Frank-N-Furter fills with each color of the rainbow, which has been linked by many critics and commentators to the pride flag. Rocky Horror, however, originally aired in 1975. Artist Gilbert Baker created the first Pride Flag several years later. It debuted in San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza for Gay Pride Day on June 25, 1978. It seems very doubtful that the film’s set designer, an Australian named Brian Thomson, who was versed with American culture through film tropes, was keyed in enough to American gay culture to understand a symbol three years before it debuted. It’s far more likely that the rainbow was referencing the peace movement of the 60s and earlier.

It’s also not clear that Dr. Frank-N-Furter was written from a place of empowerment. We already discussed how they fall into a problematic trope of trans villainy. Writer O’Brien described them in an interview as “a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Cruella de Ville of Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.” These are two people effectively remembered in the zeitgeist as monsters.

And yet, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is not entirely hateable either. He is a fun and witty character, and that makes them a great watch. Sometimes this is done voyeuristically by straight, cis-gendered people who want to gawk at the gender-nonconformity. Still, the murder and cannibalism aside, Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s character is also constructed quite empathetically. In the song I’m going home, they describe how they were rejected from their original birthplace. They have since then been drifting aimlessly through the cosmos, singing:

Everywhere it’s been the same, feeling
Like I’m outside in the rain, wheeling
Free, to try and find a game, dealing
Cards for sorrow, cards for pain

This feeling of isolation is a very familiar feeling to queer people. Its inclusion makes sense, given that writer O’Brien probably had to grapple with a fair amount of dysphoria as a genderfluid person. It’s just not coupled with the self-acceptance we have grown to expect in modern media now that LGBTQIA+ people have become more integrated into society.

It’s a transphobic characterization written by a self-hating trans-person longing to be accepted but not finding it, even within the confines of his own imagination. This dissonance creates an interesting subtext about what the trans experience has been like for many people throughout recent history. As Cáel M. Keegan writes in Flowjournal.org:

“If we look closely, we find that what at first glance looks like a nonsensical film about an insane cannibalistic transgender scientist who tortures innocent people is simultaneously a story about a transgender alien (Dr. Frank N. Furter) who has left his home planet looking for a place where his queer desires will be accepted. He travels from planet to planet, but they are all the same, and he is consistently rejected. Finally, he lands on Earth and discovers how to create life. He uses these powers to create a human companion for himself, Rocky Horror, but this cross-species relationship offends the aliens from his home planet, who kill him.”

Dr. Frank-N-Furter is born and then dies in a world that hates him. Those emotions of self-pity and despair are buried underneath the light “fun” of the entire movie. They are feelings O’Brien was undoubtedly very familiar with when he wrote the film. He has repeatedly described himself as someone who clung to humor and flair as a defense mechanism. As he told the New Zealand Magazine Stuff about growing up as queer:

“If you were gay, you couldn’t tell anybody — you’d get prison time for getting a bit of rock and roll. And being transgender was worse because you don’t fit into anything, you couldn’t explain it to anybody. So, I lived in my head and developed my imagination, to some extent. And now, here we are.”

This sense of isolation may have been demanded in the 70s when self-hatred in queerdom was the status quo, but frankly, we do not have to accept that state of affairs anymore.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter never seems able to return home. They die when the movie’s true villain, Riff Raff (also played by Richard O’Brien), guns down not only Frank-N-Furter but also characters Columbia and Rocky. This is done because these characters never “gave” him enough attention. “They never liked me,” screams Riff Raff — as Frank-N-Furter becomes yet another gender-nonconforming person gunned down by a repressed incel’s rage.

When Fox updated the movie in 2016 under the title The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again, the same thing happens — Frank-N-Furter still dies under the same circumstances. The thing I found the most strange with this mostly inferior sequel was how little was changed about the overall narrative: Brad and Janet remain a straightlaced, heterosexual couple from the burbs, the dialogue and musical scores are largely unaltered, and, again, Frank-N-Furter still dies.

It seems odd that so much reverence is paid to this text when the original creators never had it for their source material. They didn’t bother to tell a faithful story that tapped into a realistic understanding of 70s Americana. They drew upon misremembered tropes. The film was made on a shoestring budget and shot within a period of only six weeks.

Why do we have to treat this flash-in-the-pan like some sacred, unalterable text?

There are a lot of changes that could be made — both of the stage production and in any future film adaptations — that would easily make this text more inclusive: you could cast all of the characters as genderfluid (and have them played by trans actors), which would certainly alter the subtext of Brad and Janet’s journey; you could tweak the dialogue to make it more centered on consent; you could very easily make Frank-N-Furter more sympathetic by shifting the primary villain role over to Riff Raff; and finally, you could make it, so at least one of your textually trans characters finds community and acceptance at the end of the film, not just being gunned down by an incel.

Cinema has gone through a lot of changes since the 1970s, and while the acceptance of Frank-N-Furter may have been seen as an impossibility then, even among its queer creators, that certainly isn’t the case anymore. Spaces have been created for such representation, making The Rocky Horror Picture Show antiquated by comparison.

We need a story where a trans character doesn’t need to resort to villainy to find acceptance, and if we aren’t going to find it in Rocky Horror, then we need to look elsewhere on this planet filled with meaning.

Alex Has Opinions 11/10/20 Alex Has Opinions 11/10/20

Letting Go of Your Problematic Faves in Pop Culture

The art of loving problematic things.

(This story was originally published on Medium).

For years, I have watched the 2007 film Stardust about a man named Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) and his fantastical journey to retrieve a fallen star and give it to a woman in his village named Victoria (Sienna Miller). The movie was something I repeatedly watched during some of the darkest moments of my life. In high school or college, whenever I would have a particularly bad day, I would put on Stardust and get whisked away to the kingdom of Stormhold.

Stardust is a work I nostalgically love, but it has also aged terribly. The film doesn’t treat the women in it particularly well. Victoria is portrayed negatively as a woman who is simply “using” Tristan for his possessions. The shooting star, which in the land of Stormhold turns into a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes), is chained up by Tristan. He still intends to bring her to his love Victoria as an object even though Yvaine clearly has sentience. Stardust also has a cross-dressing character named Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro), who I have begun to perceive less humorously as I have acknowledged my own gender dysphoria.

I criticize films a lot as a culture writer, which generates a fair amount of defensiveness. People can get attached to the products they consume, and I am no different in that equation. There are films that I love, which produce a lot of anxiety in me once I realize how problematic the text is or how malicious their creators were to those around them.

How do you love a film like that?

The answer, like a lot of things in life, comes in embracing the dissonance. You have to accept your feelings for the text, while also recognizing that it is deeply hurtful to those around you. I think once you accept this tension, not only will you figure out a lot of strategies to feel less anxious, but you’ll open yourself up to new creators and works of art.

When texts are discovered to be “bad,” there tends to be a lot of strict lines drawn in the sand between whether someone can continue to enjoy that thing or not.

There will be those who say that you should be able to separate the text from its original environment and authorship. This approach is sometimes referred to as “Death of The Author” after the essay La mort de l’auteur by critic Roland Barthes.

Others allege that such a separation is impossible. Some will go even further and assert that by supporting a problematic author’s work, you contribute to the material oppression of those they discriminate against. This argument is especially compelling when the author is still alive and actively harming communities who are marginalized.

When the movie Ender’s Game came out in 2013, for example, there was a major call to boycott it by pro-LGBTQIA+ activists. The author of the book Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card, had been overtly discriminatory towards the LGBTQIA+ community for years: he wrote an op-ed threatening to “destroy” the government if it legalized same-sex marriage; he alleged that most gay people were the product of grooming, and so much more. Given that the movie increased the sales of Card’s novel (Ender’s Game sat on the New York Times best seller’s list for weeks in 2013), many were understandably not convinced by the Death of the Author argument. They encouraged people to cut ties with both the author and the text.

The problem with the “cutting ties” approach is that it doesn’t honor our emotional reality. As much as we might want to banish all things problematic, the feelings we have for a text do not go away simply because we have started to see the dilemmas it creates more clearly. This difficulty compounds when it’s not merely about the products we consume but also a core facet of our identity.

For example, countless people invested years in the Harry Potter franchise by the now problematic author J.K. Rowling: these fans organized annual parties, wrote fanfiction rooted in the world, and even ran organizations and nonprofits themed around the Harry Potter-verse. The divestment question becomes very difficult in these circumstances because if it is an all-or-nothing proposition, then groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) have to undo years of organizing that, before this moment, might have been doing a lot of tangible good.

It’s not as simple for everyone as just reading another book. This dissonance is why many fans of problematic works push away all criticism and instead draw on the “Death of the Author” theory as a source of comfort. They are looking for an excuse that lets them still love their problematic favorite, but what they really need is an off-ramp.

Itcan be emotional to cut ties with a problematic work because the bad we see in it seems so pressing and overwhelming. In the case of J.K. Rowling, many would argue that ignoring the author’s bigotry is unacceptable and that you, as a consumer, have a moral imperative to boycott her work. Rowling is currently spreading very toxic transphobia, and every purchase you make of her work increases her ability to continue to do so.

This road can seem scary because if we care about stopping bigotry, it becomes very easy to spiral about all the things we must do. We start to cut ties before we have really processed why or how.

However, I would argue that starting the process of divestment does not have to be a binary choice. There are ways for you to start building yourself an off-ramp with a problematic author or text while still going back to it for the sake of nostalgia.

Some practical examples include:

Stop buying the book, especially popular ones like Harry Potter and Ender’s Game. These works have sold millions of copies worldwide. I guarantee you that a copy is sitting on a friend’s bookshelf somewhere or that you can rent it out from a local library.
Divest from the author. Please don’t amplify their platform: unlike their public profiles, unsubscribe from their channels, and cancel their newsletters. These actions will go along way in reducing their influence.
Stop buying official merch. There are plenty of indie creators who are selling fantastic things under that author’s IP, and they need your money more than a problematic creator (see the vendor Man up). For organizations, this also applies to licensing agreements with the main IP. You do not need to support branding that bolsters the resources of a bad creator or text.
Look for better work. Your favorite author did not invent many of the tropes you enjoy. Someone out there has made a work that isn’t so cringeworthy.
And finally, stop making excuses for the author and the problems people point out in the text itself.

These are only suggestions, and it’s best you pick the ones that work for you rather than trying to accomplish all of them at once. However, in starting to give yourself this space, you are learning to process a life beyond this work. This allows you to grieve for the loss of an identity that is now transforming.

When you recognize that a text is problematic, what you realize is a tension that usually has always been there. For example, while J.K. Rowling is being called out for her problematic opinions now, that subtext has existed in the Harry Potter-verse for a while. She has repeatedly been called out for how her characters’ often fit bad stereotypes (see Native American wizards, Nagini, etc.). As Shubhangi Misra wrote in The Print:

“The wizarding world first created by Rowling is of, for and by White people. I don’t think there’s much to argue there. The few non-White characters she does introduce in the books are underdeveloped lazy additions that highlight her prejudice.”

This recognition can be painful because it forces us to embrace the reality that our devotion to this text has harmed other people. Countless people have consumed an American classic only to witness stereotypical representations that make them feel lesser than for watching it. We, the fans, helped perpetuate that pain, and reevaluating a text is, in many ways, grappling with that reality.

The defensiveness that comes with shouting down criticism is usually, in part, from a kneejerk reaction to preserves someone’s sense of purity. They think of themselves as a “good person,” and, by acknowledging that a thing they like is “bad,” they are being pushed to embrace a complexity that challenges that sense of self. In Naomi Slater’s fantastic essay about decoupling white maledom from open-source tech culture, they framed this identity crisis as a battle between an in-group and an out-group:

“This is about who these people believe open source is for, and by extension, their own self-identity. Indeed, when people are challenged to explain themselves, you get nonsense and cognitive dissonance. People are being openly hypocritical, with no apparent awareness. The closer they get to confronting the truth, the more likely they are to break down in anger and confusion.”

She uses this to talk about tech, but this can apply to really any subculture, especially nerd culture, which thoroughly intersects with tech. Criticism generates these responses because it asks people to expand their group to others who have been historically excluded, and by extension, to acknowledge that their previous identity was (and probably still is) exclusionary.

However, if you want to have a relationship with a problematic text, then it means that you have to embrace that dissonance and accept that these new truths are valid. You have to start recognizing the flaws in the work, and as you do this, you will strangely become less interested in how this work makes you a good or a bad person.

The text just is.

The good news is that the deconstruction of its flaws, ones you had, and hopefully are learning to shed, creates the space for new art. We learn to see what was wrong with the earlier work and strive to do better. We strive to have a wizarding novel that actually validates its queer romances in the text (e.g., Carry On, In Other Lands); a magical epic that doesn’t rely on played out racialized stereotypes (e.g., Children of Blood and Bone, Black Leopard, etc.); and a story that embraces the trans characters J.K. Rowling scorns (e.g., Dreadnought). We break tropes and create new ones — all in the hope that the next iteration will be different.

And soon, you can hardly remember the last time that you have gone back to consume that old, flawed, beloved title of your youth because your love for it has transformed into so many other things.

I forgot to watch Stardust last year. It was the first time in a decade that I had not watched it during Halloween, but skipping the film was not part of a concerted effort to watch another movie. I just started consuming other things because criticizing Stardust gave me the incentive to look for better art that didn’t frustrate me when I consumed it.

I don’t feel like I am a “bad” person for mining enjoyment in the past from this deeply flawed movie. I have started to see my love for cultural products less like a dichotomy and more like a spectrum that waxes and wanes over time. You can both grow to dislike a text and simultaneously embrace that it had a major impact on your life — one that you still think back on fondly.

In the end, you love a problematic thing with open eyes as you put it down at your own pace.

For some people, it’s the first time a problem becomes perceptible. For others, it’s more gradual. You watch it over and over again, noting flaw after flaw until eventually, you don’t want to do it anymore because something even more precious has taken its place.

It has exploded like a shooting star in the atmosphere, shattering to the far corners of the Earth for all to admire.

Alex Has Opinions 11/8/20 Alex Has Opinions 11/8/20

The Secret to Dealing with Political Uncertainty

How to make the future slightly more bearable.

(Photo by Jonathan Sebastiao on Unsplash)

(This story was originally published on Medium).

I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died. I was sitting inside the AMC movie theater in Georgetown. I had just finished watching the 2016 meta superhero comedy Deadpool, and everyone in the audience was turning on their phones.

From behind me, several students gleefully announced that “Scalia was dead.” I remember walking slightly behind them as we exited the theater. They were speculating how much this was going to change society. Obama would pick this seat now, and then when Hillary Clinton became president, she would replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone forty years younger. These turn of events, they cheered, would secure the Court for progressives for almost a generation.

Four long, painful years later, we know that the exact opposite has happened. Mitch McConnell refused to nominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and now a president Trump has been allowed to nominate three Justices. He has consequently pushed the court so far right that even moderate Senators are talking about removing the Filibuster and stacking the Court.

I can guarantee you that the political reality you are so certain of at this moment will not come to pass — at least not exactly as you imagine it. The secret to surviving to that hazy, indeterminate future involves learning to separate fear from legitimate worry, to freak out when necessary, and to plan accordingly.

Yes, Freak Out

The first mistake people often make with drastic events is to assume everything will continue as normal. It’s a cliche at this point to talk about the Holocaust-inspired passage First they came by pastor Martin Niemöller. The poetic passage discusses how people’s indifference to the Nazi Party’s targeting of various groups allowed them to divide and conquer. By the time they went after the author, there was no one left to speak out for him:

“First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

The poem is semi-autobiographical as Niemöller was a fervent anti-Communist pastor who was initially supportive of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power but eventually ended up in a concentration camp himself.

This desire to minimize threats and assume everything will be okay is often referred to in psychology as “normalcy bias.” It is a prevalent feature during looming moments of crisis. As war reporter Janine Di Giovanni wrote in her article America Shows Troubling Warning Signs of a Slide Into Civil War:

“I always ask people caught in conflicts the same question: “Why did it take you so long to leave?” Or “Why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?” The answer is nearly always the same: because we never thought it would happen.”

Bad things occur when people assume everything will go back to normal. So overreacting politically to disruption is not actually an unwise strategy— it is better for your fears of fascism to retrospectively be proven silly than correct.

There is a compelling body of evidence that the U.S. public’s early reaction to Trump’s Muslim ban delayed its implementation. Outrage to the Republican Party trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act likewise slowed its destruction — though efforts are still underway. The same can be said of the public toppling dictatorial leaders such as Park Geun-hye in South Korea and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. Effective political mobilization does curb and sometimes even reverses unwelcome changes.

The problem comes, not from volunteering too much, organizing in the streets too vehemently, or donating too many dollars to progressive causes you believe in (continue to do those things), but when we over-inflate the initial response. You see, normalcy bias can work in the other direction too. When there is a political upset (and we have been livening in one for the past four years), many tend to initially succumb to “catastrophic thinking,” where we imagine that a bad scenario will rollout immediately, but then go back to our baseline went that doesn’t happen.

This scenario played out following the election of Donald Trump, where there was an understandable fear that the country would devolve into outright fascism. Since this didn't happen immediately, many started to downplay his administration’s more terrible aspects because the reality they were experiencing didn’t meet the apocalyptic scenario they’d built up in their head. In the middle of his first term, the common talking point came to be that he was more or less a traditional Republican.

‘Once a populist, Trump governs like a conservative Republican,’ starts an article by John Wagner and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post.

‘Trump isn’t changing the Republican Party. The Republican Party is changing Trump,’ is the title of another charged, WaPo editorial. This time by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins.

Yet, as his response to the coronavirus has shown, there are many areas where his leadership was catastrophic. It just took us longer than 100 days to reach that point. The assumption that politics would go forward more or less as usual allowed the administration to advance some truly terrible policies that did not receive a whole lot of attention, such as the dismantling of an EPA regulation that protects the nation’s rivers from coal waste, the dissolution of a committee meant to safeguard America’s voting systems, and the dismantling of the White House’s pandemic response team.

Again, it is less dangerous to overestimate a political problem than to underestimate it, but “freaking out” cannot be done indefinitely without proper management. To avoid burnout and thought distortions such as catastrophic thinking, you have to go further than merely worry about an impending problem. You have to assess where you stand in this equation as well.

Understand Your Privilege

Not everyone is affected by a bad scenario equally. When the Coronavirus first swept the world, it was a common talking point that we were all in this together. Yet as the pandemic worsened already existing inequalities, people quickly began to sour on the idea that celebrities and wealthy business people were experiencing this problem at the same capacity as everyone else. Some people were out of work and without healthcare, while celebrities sang John Lennon’s Imagine in their mansions, and Kim Kardashian planned an island vacation for her birthday.

This is what liberals refer to as a privilege, which essentially means that when the “shit hit the fan,” on average, you are not as impacted as other groups of people. For some people, these last four years under Trump have been a hellish nightmare. They have involved the deportation of their loved ones, the uprooting of their homes, and the loss of their rights. For others, it has only been an affront to their sense of decency. Trump's actions have hurt their conception of what America is, but not really impacted them financially or physically.

In the context of America in 2020, where do you stand in this equation?

Have you been materially affected these last four years, or has your financial standing increased?
Are you imminently at risk of getting deported or imprisoned?
Do you currently work for a company that will back your health insurance, regardless of changes in national legislation?
Do you rely on a political right that has only been awarded to you very recently (i.e., within the last ten years)? And if so, are there political rights you currently lack?
Do you belong to a minority group that receives ongoing acts of harassment and brutality within your community?

I ask these questions because if you are not materially affected, this doesn’t make the political moment any less bad, but it does mean that this probably isn’t about you directly. If you are a rich white woman worried about the prospect of losing your right to an abortion, I agree that that is rightfully terrifying, but the people who will be denied the most access are women of color. If you are a wealthy gay man consumed by the dread that the state may nullify your marriage, I agree that that is unjust, but you probably will be able to afford healthcare regardless.

As we have briefly mentioned, there is a type of thought distortion known as “catastrophizing.” This is when you assume the worse will come to pass or that you falsely believe that you are in a worse situation than you really are. I see very privileged people do this when they talk about the future, especially when it comes to social media. The phrase “dooms-scrolling,” or the habit of obsessively researching bad news on your feed, has become popular to describe a type of catastrophizing that leads to self-harm. You aren’t researching the news to help yourself in the political battle against fascism. You are doing it to increase your sense of dread. As psychologist Dr. Amelia Aldao told NPR:

“Our minds are wired to look out for threats. The more time we spend scrolling, the more we find those dangers, the more we get sucked into them, the more anxious we get.”

Your anxiety over the future might be drowning out the concerns of people whose lives are impacted in the here and now. Please dial back the calls to move to Canada or to buy a bunker and realize that you are in the monetary position to help a lot of people. The act of reducing your anxiety will give you the space to share your resources with those who really need them.

In the end, you need to develop a plan for action that is not linked to your fear of what will happen to you specifically, because as a privileged person, by the time that happens, it will already be too late. In this situation, you are Niemöller, not the trade unionist fearing the Nazis will knock down their door.

Reducing Anxiety Is a Must

If the risks I mentioned are real to you (see the bullet list above), then I think trying to reduce your anxiety and fear is still a must. There are many tools out there that can assist with mitigating anxiety, though they admittedly are constrained significantly by cost. Selfcare applications such as Headspace and Betterhelp can get into the range of hundreds of dollars a month, though there are some slightly cheaper alternatives such as Wysa.

These tools, however, are not a substitute for success in the realm of politics. As you are well aware, meditation and self-care cannot replace healthcare and rent. It would be the height of arrogance to assert that one person’s actions can ever be enough to mitigate unforeseen events — that is, the delusion of the privileged. People cannot change their circumstances like you would a piece of clothing.

For example, it has become a common question in the cultural zeitgeist to monolithically ask why “the Jews” did not simply leave Nazi Germany before the Holocaust ramped up? Many paint the Jewish people during this time as susceptible to normalcy bias. Numerous Jews attempted to wait out the Nazi Regime, as they had done for oppressive regimes throughout European history, and this time things did not go their way.

Obviously, this framing is an oversimplification of the social, monetary, and political barriers that existed. While some Jews did leave the country, especially after a pogrom known as Kristallnacht (or the Night of Broken Glass), the majority were trapped because they possessed neither the money nor the documentation to go to another country. It is not so easy to pack up your life and leave, especially when “civilized” countries such as the United States and Great Britain neglected to process the paperwork for thousands of Jewish immigrants and limited the number of refugees overall.

The same can be said of the current situation when rich people talk about moving to Canada or New Zealand in response to climate change or increased political instability. They are ultimately engaging in a very privileged form of catastrophizing, as they hoard resources to prepare for the worst possible scenario playing out inside their minds. Most people cannot afford to do that, especially right now, when the world has closed many of its borders in response to the coronavirus.

The majority of people cannot individually plan to protect themselves from all of the world's problems.

Yet it would be best if you still planned, and there is plenty of research saying the act of making a plan has huge benefits, but we need to recognize the inequity present in uncertainty. Some people's presents are uncertain, not just their futures. And while very privileged people may be able to bemoan every bad thing coming in the future, that is only because they have an inordinate amount of time and resources to do so. For everyone else, that amount of fear and anxiety is dysfunctional. How could anyone have the capacity to worry about a problem ten years down the line when they struggle to pay their bills now?

While a rich person reducing their anxiety allows them to maximize their gains (and in some rare cases, their philanthropy), I maintain that it is an act of defiance for everyone else. It is perfectly rational to be consumed with dread in an age where so much is going wrong. We live in a collapsing country on top of a dying world, and yet to continuing going on with your life is an implicit commitment to solving those problems.

Yet the solution will not come by building a bunker in your backyard or stockpiling mountains of toilet paper — again; only the privileged can maintain the fantasy that an individual can prepare against the future’s onslaught alone. The solution comes when we strengthen our bonds with one another. Through community, not by building a wall or boarding up our doors, we will solve this dire predicament.

I could point to the countless articles and studies indicating that we feel better when involved in a community, but I don’t think that is necessary. You know that the world feels less dark when you are not alone.

The truth is that we will never have enough information to face the future. We are not only swamped by too much information, but we are on the precipice of so many scary and exciting changes. I briefly mentioned climate change, but there is also automation, genetic-engineering, artificial intelligence, and the half a dozen other shifts in society that neither I nor anyone else, can fully anticipate how they will alter our world until after the good (or bad) has been done.

I talked about how giddy those Georgetown students were when they first heard that Scalia had died, but I was giddy too. I could also visualize the world they imagined. I was excited about this vision of a future where we moved towards genuine progress. The Court would turn leftward for a generation, and everything would be better.

Then everything changed, and now we are here.

To live is to be certain about the present only in retrospect.

It is good to be anxious — that means you care. It signals that you are paying attention to the problems around us, and a problem cannot be solved if it is not first seen. When I give into my anxiety fully, however, it pushes me away from the people I care about. I become more withdrawn, and I stop being able to participate in the world.

The good we will experience in the future will come from collaborating with others and building communities that empower us to act. We need to focus less on how we as individuals can fight the most pressing problems of our time — we can’t alone — and instead focus on how we can do so as a community, people, and perhaps even a nation.

The future is only scary when you are fighting it alone.

Alex Has Opinions 10/30/20 Alex Has Opinions 10/30/20

Elites Don’t Want You To Vote

The powerful have always been afraid of your ballot

Every election cycle, men and women reemerge to tell us that our vote has no value. They insist that the public is generally misinformed about the issues and that we should instead let ourselves be led by smarter, more objective rulers who understand how the world really works.

Every time this advice is offered to me, I cannot help but think of the character Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) from Game of Thrones (2011–2019). When the medieval fantasy show ended in the summer of 2019, the answer to who would sit on the Iron Throne and rule over the fictional continent of Westeros was finally answered: Bran Stark was appointed King because he was a dispassioned ruler who would not succumb to the petty impulses of the late King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) or the genocidal ones of the Mad King.

All-knowing and singularly focused, Bran is cold, rational, and “perfect.” He does not get bogged down by the whims of his predecessors because he has transcended the person he used to be. He delegates most of the actual governing to the realm's technocrats, such as Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and Samwell Tarly (John Bradley). He instead spends his supernatural abilities on larger tasks such as hunting down dragons.

I remembered being incredibly frustrated when the series finale ended, in part, because Bran didn’t seem like a good leader. He was unfeeling in his outlook, withholding his future sight to let thousands die during the battles of Winterfell and King’s Landing. Wasn’t this cold Machveiallian outlook no worse than Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) or the dozens of other ruthless leaders dotting the history of the show?

And yet, the idea of a cold, benevolent ruler has existed in the world of philosophy for generations. The shadow of this utopian figure has haunted our discussion of politics as commentators scoff at consensus-building and point to this mythical figure as the person who should lead us. We shouldn't listen to our own thoughts about justice or governance. No, we should rely on the Brans of the world.

Vote for them, or better yet, don’t vote at all.

This paternalistic outlook is as old as democracy itself. It has nothing to do with proper leadership, but rather, it is about convincing everyone else that they are better off not questioning those in power.

Democracy is a historical anomaly. While anthropological evidence suggests that some pre-agricultural societies were more egalitarian in the past, most of our recorded history has been one of tyrants, kings, emperors, high priests, and committees leading over their subjects. The idea that citizens should elect their leaders, and, in some cases, craft their own laws, has only enjoyed popularity very recently. It’s a sadly novel idea, and one that has faced immense resistance from our society’s most educated and celebrated minds.

One of the first recorded Democracies was ancient Athens during the late 6th century BCE, and it was slightly different from the representative democracies of the modern world. While citizenship was constrained only to free men (women, slaves, foreign residents, and children were not considered citizens), it was far more active than simply choosing a representative. Some political positions were chosen by lot (see the Boule), and their legislative Assembly (see the Ecclesia) was opened to all citizens who qualified.

Critics of this system emerged from men we widely celebrate today. Prolific philosopher Plato (428/427 — 348/347 BCE) wrote disdainfully of ancient democracy. He was deeply impacted by his mentor Socrates's prosecution and execution (470–399 BCE) in the Athenian justice system. Plato thought that this decision was indicative of majority rule in general. He advocated for leadership, not dictated by the majority's will, but through men skilled in governing. In book six of The Republic, he analogized a country's stewardship to the captain of a boat singularly focused on his craft — a metaphor popularly referred to as “Ship of State.”

A grim example of the Ship of State principle is the dystopian science fiction movie Snowpiercer (2013) by director Bong Joon-ho. The film takes place after geoengineering has created a new Ice Age that makes the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. The last surviving remnants of humanity live aboard a train that circles the globe indefinitely and is heavily stratified by class. This straightforward metaphor for capitalism has the poor living in the cramped tail section, while the rich live it up in first-class. The train is helmed by their leader Mr. Wilfred, and they have an almost God-like reverence for his leadership. As a teacher explains to a classroom full of children:

“If we ever go outside the train? We’d all freeze and die. If the engine stops running? We’d all die. And who takes care of the Sacred Engine? Mr. Wilford!”

The picture we have here in both Snowpiercer and Plato’s original Ship of State metaphor is of an educated man knowing what’s best — the inputs of his “lessers” be damned — which is an awfully convenient position for a powerful person to take when arguing for who should command a society. Plato’s conception of a good leader would go on to be called a “Philosopher King.”

This viewpoint would impact “Western” thought for thousands of years: Plato’s pupil Aristotle would argue that governments were best led not by the many, but by virtuous men; Nietzsche detested the “mob” of democracy in favor of a more virtuous Übermensch; John Stewart Mill suggested that extra votes should be given based on citizens’ education level; and even in the modern era, academics such as Jason Brennan argue that our government would be better off under the rule of knowledgeable technocrats and academics (known as an “epistocracy”).

Brennan labeled his ideal class of political participants “Vulcans,” after the aliens in Star Trek, for their ability to gauge facts dispassionately. As Writer Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote favorably of Brennan’s work in Reason Magazine:

“Encouraging more ignorant people to vote is not just pointless, argues Jason Brennan; it’s morally wrong. There is no duty to vote, but many people may have a duty not to vote. Boosting turnout among citizens who are young, uneducated, or otherwise less likely to be engaged — the primary targets of get-out-the-vote campaigns — is likely to have the unintended consequence of encouraging people to fail in that duty.”

Time and time again, the narrative is for common “ignorant” people to stand aside as more “sensible” minds take the helm. Yet, whether you are calling your objective, unfeeling leader a Vulcan, a Philosopher King, an Übermensch, or a Bran Stark, these figures are striking for their detachment from reality. Bran Stark could lead Westeros because he was a demi-God connected to a system of magical trees spanning the continent.

That type of person doesn’t exist in real life.

Despite this anti-Democratic critique's prolific nature, there is no concrete evidence that more “educated” people are better at making decisions. Educated people make poor decisions all the time. So much so that the question “Why are smart people so dumb?” has become a meme.

This oversight applies especially in politics, where educated people don’t seem to be more objective in their political decision-making. One widely cited study titled Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government suggests that your ability to solve math problems is impacted when said problem contradicts your political preferences. There are also historical events such as the war in Iraq, the election of Donald Trump, or the early spread of the Coronavirus, where educated people were confident about a decision that would later turn out to be calamitous. To that last point, as late as March, I, a person who researches for a living, still thought the Coronavirus was no worse than Influenza.

Smart people don’t know everything.

The idea of intelligence itself is a highly contentious and poorly understood concept that changes radically depending on your cultural context (see the racist history behind the concept of Intelligence). It’s common in the United States to associate more education with liberal thought. Still, a conflicting 2011 study by academics Rindermann, Flores-Mendoza, and Woodley found that education was linked to center-right and centrist ideology in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

Our perception of intelligence is based on subjective values that change greatly depending on where you are in the world.

Smart people are just like us in the sense that they have cognitive biases that prevent them from seeing the full picture. If we only listened to the educated unquestioningly, we would not have advanced in areas where they were wrong, and they are wrong a lot. For example, Charles Darwin, the person described by many as the Father of Modern Biology, was adamant in public that women were inferior to men and should exist within separate spheres. The fact that he was highly educated and knowledgeable about biology didn’t mean he was any better at handling the political question of female emancipation.

The idea that regular people shouldn’t participate in politics has less to do with the superiority of the knowledgeable and more about powerful people’s fear of what comes after they stop captaining the boat.

The powerful have always been terrified by the will of the majority. Plato believed that a pure democracy was one step away from tyranny. Philosopher Hobbes described in his seminal work the Leviathan that our state of nature outside of society is a “war of all against all.” There is this widespread fear amongst elites that if you remove the constraints of “civilization,” then the people will descend into an unruly mob.

In disaster studies, there is a name for the upper classes' widespread fear to assume the worst from people. It’s called “Elite Panic.” Coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers University, the term describes a phenomenon in disasters where the rich and powerful use this worldview as a justification to panic, and in some cases, preemptively punish the “mob” they fear will inevitably form in the aftermath.

A quintessential example of this is the response effort to Hurricane Katrina. The image portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed), evacuees were hurting each other. Mayor Nagin saying:

“They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

These statements would later be deemed exaggerations, but this perception of looters would have a detrimental impact on the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to “secure the city.” As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisiana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard and private security forces hired by the wealthy entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did. As one community organizer told The New York Times several years later of the violence in the Algiers neighborhood:

“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks. I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.”

This hodgepodge of local, state, federal, and private forces would be an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks to come: officers would detain and in some cases harass citizens distributing supplies; vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts, and very early into the recovery the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the looting. The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme).

Not only did “the mob” in New Orleans not devolve into chaos, but it was also followed by a lot of spontaneous mutual aid and charity. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic as well as distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed “the Cajun Navy” rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops.

While humans are not perfect during a crisis, much like our misconceptions about the Philosopher King, they don’t always devolve into chaos either. In fact, moments of crisis are often filled with examples of strangers coming together for no other reason than that they want to help each other. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), author Rebecca Solnit highlights dozens of examples of people preserving during moments of disaster. The early days of the 1906 San Franciso Earthquake are known for makeshift community kitchens. Londoners during The Blitz are routinely cited as being more unified following the bombings.

The mob that men like Mayor Nagin fear often doesn’t come, and yet we see this fear everywhere in our culture. You cannot turn on a movie, show, or briefing without some authority figure justifying why they won’t relay information to the public. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn’t share the existence of aliens with the public. “Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but
panic,” says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The fear of public unrest, however, was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction.

In a more serious, real-life example, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo refused to take more drastic steps to curb the Coronavirus out of the same concern. He said at a press conference in February: “We have to keep this in perspective. There is no reason to panic. There is no reason to have an inordinate amount of fear about this situation.”

We see this same fear of the mob built into the very bedrock of our government. James Madison in Federalist Paper Number 10 discussed a concern about curbing the influence of an “overbearing majority.” When we look at our political institutions, such as the Senate or the Electoral College, they are built on the premise that the government must be insulated from the people's will. For example, the presidency is not decided by the popular vote alone, but by electors who are awarded to states in a way that deflates the influence of more populous ones.

Like with disasters, however, this fear has not insulated the United States from the rise of right-wing populism but exacerbated it. The anti-populist Electoral College assured President Donald Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton famously secured the popular vote, but because of the Founding Father’s fear of the people, an obviously incompetent authoritarian was put into office.

There is an argument to be made that the over-inflation of rural interests via the Senate and House of Representatives has likewise undermined our democracy. When it comes to voting overall, Democrats routinely outperform Republicans nationally in elections. Still, the federal legislature's structure means that the Democratic Party has to win by huge majorities to take hold of either chamber. Rather than form a coalition represented by the nation's interests, this disparity has incentivized the Republican party to rely on voter suppression to win elections, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the Founder’s fear of the public.

Anti-populism has not inoculated us from demagoguery, and it, in fact, ignores successful movements in history, such as FDR’s New Deal, that have given us noteworthy reforms. There are plenty of examples throughout history of leaders who have the public’s ear and do not use it to become tyrants.

This intrinsic fear of “the people” has less to do with our state of nature and more about the elite's cruelty.

From Plato to Nietzsche, most of the philosophers and academics we have referenced today were supporters, or in many cases, members of the upper class. Plato was born into a prominent Athenian family, and John Stuart Mill’s father was a famous philosopher who rubbed elbows with the likes of Jeremy Bentham.

As our values have progressed, we have had this desire to cauterize these thinkers' outdated views from the ones we consider useful. Plato is routinely cited as an influential political thinker, even if his views on women and slavery are rightfully deemed antiquated by today’s standards. We preface our most lauded thinkers with calls to place them into their proper historical context, ignoring that maybe their cold outlook is foundational, not ancillary, to their worldviews.

For example, when it comes to Plato’s understanding of human nature, we should recognize that his idea of slavery cannot be viewed in isolation. Plato, who also owned slaves, tied his justification of slavery into his aristocratic belief that certain people are just superior, writing in the Gorgias:

“…nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.”

This is the logic of a fascist who does not value human life. There’s a scene from FX’s TV show Archer (2009 — present) where the secret agent protagonist Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is confronting a South American dictator named Caldarone, and the latter provides a very similar metaphor to Plato’s when justifying the violence of his leadership:

CALDARONE: Meat is whatever the tiger says is meat. Because God made him the boss and all the other animals his food.”

To which a sarcastic Archer replies:

“ARCHER:…thank you, George Bore-well, for that clunky analogy in defense of totalitarianism!”

I watched this episode very close to when I read Plato’s Gorgias, and it struck me because it was the same logic. Plato, like Caldarone, was a slave owner rationalizing his cruelty. He thought that slaves were just naturally meant to be slaves, and in a move very similar to chattel slavery, even advocated that the offsprings of slaves should belong to their masters. It should be noted that Plato and his student Aristotle stood against an ancient Athenian movement to abolish slavery. If they were transported to our time, then they probably would align more closely with far-right reactionaries than anyone we associate today with political freedom.

However, buried underneath this justification of a “natural order” was panic that the status quo would become disrupted. Plato was fearful of slave revolts and wrote in his work titled Laws a series of prescriptions to avoid them, including to make sure your country’s slaves do not have a shared heritage or language. He would go on in Laws to describe the various ways owners should treat their slaves to avoid insubordination.

Likewise, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, although occasionally critical of the institution of slavery, was also fearful of the possibility of revolt. When it came to his own slaves, he would only free 10 out of the 600 enslaved people he held in bondage throughout the course of his life. Part of the reason for this hesitancy came down to fear. He once described owning a slave as holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

These men were terrified that the people they had enslaved — the people they had denied their humanity — would rise up and kill them. It was not an irrational fear. History is filled with slave revolts and uprisings. American history has at least 250, and Jefferson was aware of them — the Haitian Uprising generated particular concern for him.

However, these moments in time were not lawless masses of people descending into mayhem the moment their bondage was lifted. They were reacting to injustice and fighting for their freedom against the people who had robbed them of their humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” Slaves revolted because they were in bondage — not because of the savagery of human nature.

We saw similar sentiments from elite academics in response to the French Revolution. People such as Edmund Burke claimed that it was destroying French society. In his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he discussed the tyranny of the mob, writing:

“If I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, whenever strong divisions prevail (as they often must in that kind of polity), the majority of the citizens is capable of cruelly oppressing the minority, and that this oppression will extend to far greater numbers and will be carried on with much greater fury than can almost ever be feared from a monarchy.”

This claim that the majority is to be more feared than the monarchy may be true for someone of Burke’s standing (he was a famous writer and his father was a successful solicitor). Still, the fact remains that the French peasantry was suffering due to the monarchy’s political incompetence. The price of bread, the primary food stable for the peasantry at the time, had increased significantly after two years of failed harvests up to an estimated 88% of a worker’s wages. People blamed the aristocracy for that, not simply because of politics, but because they were starving.

It’s telling that the powerful choose to see these moments in isolation from the larger, systemic problems that caused the populace to revolt in the first place. Their labeling of humanity as a mob allowed them to uncritically sidestep all accusations of cruelty and mismanagement inflicted by those in charge. When you see all humans as potential barbarians-in-the-making, it becomes really easy to justify any violence against them.

The privileged have employed this belief as a shield to preserve their own power. They were and are continuing to project their fear of losing power onto humanity as a whole, and it has tainted how we perceive society and human nature itself.

The finale episode of Game of Thrones ends with Westeros' surviving lords and ladies deciding who will lead them. The character Samwell Tarly meekly stands up and suggests that maybe the people should elect their leader, to which the nobles respond with uproarious laughter. Lord Edmure Tully sarcastically remarking: “Maybe we should give the dogs a vote as well?”

They then elect Bran Stark — the unfeeling Vulcan and Philosopher King — who seems disinterested in bettering the lives of the average Westerosian. The series ends much how it started, with nobles arguing around a table about how to lead the country, all promises of broken wheels, and reform left to the wayside.

This is a form of propaganda thousands of years in the making. The elite have held disdain for those beneath them for as long as we have debated who holds power. Every year people — who are either wealthy or uplifted by wealthy interests — tell you paradoxically that not only does your vote not matter but that it is a dangerous thing worthy of being feared.

But dangerous to whom?

If we truly valued all voices, then those uplifted by wealth might have more to worry about than “too many voting.”