{"id":22388,"date":"2017-02-10T08:00:44","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22388"},"modified":"2017-02-11T09:38:23","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T13:38:23","slug":"reaching-the-moral-high-ground-and-finding-it-barren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/02\/10\/reaching-the-moral-high-ground-and-finding-it-barren\/","title":{"rendered":"Reaching the Moral High Ground and Finding It Barren"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Milo Yiannopoulos tried to speak at the UC\u2013Berkeley campus a few weeks ago and the residents and students stopped him. The Berkeley News reported that, \u201cno major injuries and about a half dozen minor injuries\u201d occurred, a few fires were set, and fireworks were aimed at police. That\u2019s less property damage and violence than a particularly popular World Series game. Still though, many people are not convinced that\u00a0what happened was productive. In fact, many are questioning whether this is another kind of headfake<\/a> that will ultimately come back to haunt us. Protest that does anything\u00a0more than gather people together to chant and hold signs, could add fuel to the growing nazi fire.<\/p>\n

The effective-protest-is-not-actually-good-but-in-fact-is-bad\u00a0line of reasoning is best articulated in Thursday’s\u00a0Observer<\/em> article by Ryan Holiday where he writes:<\/p>\n

Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it\u2019s actually a huge opportunity: Because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility.\u00a0Someone like Milo or\u00a0Mike Cernovich<\/a>\u00a0doesn\u2019t care that you hate them\u2014they like it. It\u2019s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful.\u00a0It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action\u2014it creates purpose and meaning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Holiday knows what he is talking about. His\u00a0book\u00a0Trust Me I\u2019m Lying<\/em>\u00a0lays out the tactics that got rape culture media artifacts like Tucker Max’s book and movie\u00a0into the national spotlight. By taking out highly offensive ads (e.g. rape jokes about blind women) and then\u00a0participating in the coverage of the ensuing controversy, a “niche player” like Max can not only get loyal fans, they can find every single one of them thanks to\u00a0all of the media attention. Holiday contends giving away his tricks by publishing Trust Me I’m Lying<\/em>\u00a0was necessary because\u00a0\u201cothers might soon use them to sell something more nefarious.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is difficult to get past the fact that liberals are earnestly and completely believing (and sharing!) an essay prescribing protest techniques in the Observer,\u00a0<\/em>a magazine owned by Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner. <\/em>Still though, let\u2019s take this professional media manipulator at his word (for some reason, everyone else is doing it) and look at where it takes us.<\/p>\n

Holiday argues that, \u201cThe last thing you ever want to do is give an opponent the moral high ground\u2014and attempts to suppress, intimidate and revoke constitutional rights do exactly that.\u201d He goes on:<\/p>\n

If you actually want to fight back against these trolls, here\u2019s a strategy to consider: Organize all you want, get as many people as you can to show up at their events, but don\u2019t try to shut them down. In fact, the only thing you should try to shut down are the instigators who try to incite violence. Regain the moral high ground by saying that you absolutely respect their right to free speech.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is nonsense for three reasons. First, this is precisely what the mainstream left has been doing for 30 years with little-to-no-success. The single largest day of peaceful protest in world history wasn\u2019t enough to prevent the War in Iraq. The “when they go low you go high” tactic of the 2016 campaign doesn’t seem to have convinced anyone of anything either. The so-called moral high ground was no use then, and it is far from useful now.\u00a0If the secret to political success was polite protest then\u00a0Democrats would not be the minority in governors’ mansions, Congress, and (soon) the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Second, Holiday\u2019s formulation misses the content of Milo\u2019s talk and its direct consequences. Milo sought to name undocumented students and call for their expulsion through legal and extralegal means. Such an action seems far more violent than burning trash cans and fireworks aimed at well-armored police. Holiday is trying\u00a0to compare an (admittedly disgusting) movie and book to Milo’s campaign to incite targeted violence on specific\u00a0groups of people. He is equating hate speech with advertising a movie.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to reason number three: The moral high ground is not simply claimed, it is created. The idea that protestors stopping hate speech through direct action is somehow something to be ashamed of is the exact reason why Democrats are often caricatured\u00a0as cowards and fair-weather friends. By sharing articles that cast direct action as unseemly, liberals are building a moral high ground for Milo to stand on. The idea\u00a0that\u00a0using\u00a0a booking agent to rent an auditorium to spew hate imbues you\u00a0with legitimacy while protestors who are protecting vulnerable members of their community are cast as rouge vigilantes, is not an immutable truth. Holiday\u2019s prescription becomes more true the more you share his article. The very sharing of articles like Holiday\u2019s is what creates the kind of moral high ground that Milo can stand on and undocumented UC-Berkeley\u00a0students cannot.<\/p>\n

What dissolves the moral high ground as it is presently conceived is changing the discourse around structural violence, property damage, and free speech. Structural violence must be understood as something that can happen in private, in secret, and just because a black bloc appears<\/em> more violent on its surface it pales in comparison to the regular deportations in this country that rip families apart. Reactions to property damage must be couched in a history of humans-as-property<\/a>, that is, property owned by white people should not be afforded the same care and concern as living black and brown bodies.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is the matter of free speech. Rather than accept the conservative frame that all speech is equal, we need to adopt a more justice-oriented understanding of speech that acknowledges the fact that the free expression of white supremacist views hampers the free speech of many others and, if left unchecked, leads to the silencing of everyone else.<\/p>\n

Then there is the matter of Holiday\u2019s assessment of past activism and what constitutes \u201ceffective counterinsurgency.\u201d He suggests we focus on \u201cbargaining, partnering and the reestablishment of norms\u2014not hardlines.\u201d Essentially, you have to offer Milo and his ilk\u00a0the opportunity to actually have a say in something\u2014\u201cput up or shut up\u201d as he puts it\u2014and watch the whole thing fall apart because the Alt-Right are all bark and no bite.<\/p>\n

None of this is even remotely connected to reality. This suggestion might be close to the truth if Milo\u2019s former boss Steve Bannon didn\u2019t have an office in the White House where he is writing executive orders with the same speed and ideological purity of a Breitbart<\/em> article. The Alt-Right has an immense amount of power and they have bitten hard.<\/p>\n

What is particularly frustrating here is that people who are sharing this Observer<\/em> article are likely to have shared Lindy West\u2019s landmark 2013 Jezebel<\/em> article, \u201cDon’t Ignore the Trolls. Feed Them Until They Explode.<\/a>\u201d In this essay\u00a0she argues that, rather than ignore every troll that threatens you on Twitter or some other kind of semi-anonymous internet forum, you should talk back: “I talk back because the expectation is that when you tell a woman to shut up, she should shut up. I reject that. I talk back because it’s fun, sometimes, to rip an abusive dummy to shreds with my friends. I talk back because\u00a0my<\/em>\u00a0mental health is my priority\u2014not some troll’s personal satisfaction.”<\/p>\n

West further argues that this is much more than talk and can have very real, material consequences that can keep people safe.\u00a0If such an argument holds for white liberal feminists it should hold for undocumented immigrants. If this argument holds for high-profile writers\u00a0on Twitter, it should hold for radicals and undocumented immigrants that are being threatened by a well-financed author with direct personal ties to the President’s senior staff.<\/p>\n

Creating a 21st century attention economy helmed by\u00a0people with more expertise in statistics than\u00a0theories of attention was a bad idea, and this has made our media deeply susceptible to manipulation. Holiday is certainly right that we have to be careful about how we use the media in the next few years, but this fight cannot be reduced to optics. Holiday is making a clear “don\u2019t feed the trolls” argument which is no different than West’s detractors telling her to just ignore her harassers. To fuss and hand-wring about confronting fascists because you might be giving them the attention they crave is to ignore the deeply violent things they will do to others when you are not paying attention.<\/p>\n

David is on<\/em> Twitter.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Image source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Milo Yiannopoulos tried to speak at the UC\u2013Berkeley campus a few weeks ago and the residents and students stopped him. The Berkeley News reported that, \u201cno major injuries and about a half dozen minor injuries\u201d occurred, a few fires were set, and fireworks were aimed at police. That\u2019s less property damage and violence than a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":22389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,892],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2017\/02\/2703194983_c983916780_z.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22388"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22402,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22388\/revisions\/22402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}