Panel 4

Why is all of this important? This is Stage 4 Cancer for Twitter, when it’s most powerful and redeeming quality, the instant ability to get accurate news, becomes worthless. More importantly, however, it shows at the highest level how insidiously Twitter can be used as a weapon when desired, and that takes us to the rise of the modern social justice movement.

Social Justice activists have long relied on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which is the roadmap for all forms of left-leaning organized political activism. Variations of these rules were used with great success in the Civil Rights Era, and continue to be used today. Prior to the world-wide web’s introduction, organized activism required a great deal of physical effort and commitment. The rise of the internet gave birth to a new form of activism that led to greatly increased impact with much less effort.

Rather than having to personally attend meetings, hand-deliver information, and recruit on the streets activists who embraced the emerging internet found it easier than ever before to organize resistance, recruit, and spread their message. This exponentially increased the ease of which to contribute and recruit. Before the end of the century, you could participate in fundraising, discussion, organization, and more right from the seat in your office while you were at work.

Of course, it also has led to an increase in the group think of echo chambers. As we have seen recently, the ability to find like-minded groups, people, and news can lead to a more dividend populace that is out of touch with the overall reality of the country. This goes for shuttered ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum. And it is especially true of Washington politicians and the news media.

These advancements also made it considerably easier for individuals to organize activism outside of the normal channels. Opening a political activist office takes time, capital, and other resources. But anyone can put up a webpage promoting a cause they believe in. Today there are websites that will do it all for you. And Social Media has given every individual a platform to reach many other people without any hassle at all. Twitter, the ultimate social media platform, lets any individual reach the entire world in an instant. It has given every single person with access to the internet the ability to speak to the entire planet. Perhaps more importantly, it gives the entire world the ability to speak back to the individual.

Herein lies the central problem with Twitter. By design, it is meant to facilitate short, informal and un-rehearsed conversation of the type that usually has been reserved for the water cooler. It’s filled with off-the-cuff remarks and attempts at satirical humor. So therefore it is ripe for misinterpretation and out-of-context misunderstandings. Or for massive overreactions to distasteful comments. Since the very beginning of Twitter, people have been getting themselves into trouble with ill-advised Tweets. The most infamous are certainly the dozens if not hundreds of celebrities that have squarely put their foot in mouth. However, given their fandom they are largely immune to the consequences of such actions.

There are countless others who are not, and have literally had their lives ruined as the result of Twitter shaming by mobs of other users who I collectively refer to the Twitterazi (much like a swarm of Papparazi that care little for the privacy or safety of their targets). Public shaming has a lengthy history in the world of civilized man, but internet shaming has taken the act to new extremes. While the reasons for the fervent shaming are legion, they have many ties to the Millennial attitude mentioned earlier. And in many cases, such online mobs are organized, directed, and manipulated by the Social Justice Warriors.

The typical Twitterazi mob follows many of the same Rules for Radicals that traditional activists do, but are able to achieve much higher levels of success due to the sheer volume of mob members that they can organize and call on through hashtag activism. The tactics rely on selecting a target that has done or said something deemed “offensive” and then waging a public campaign against the target to win concessions from them (usually getting them fired, expelled, or just plain humiliated). Such offensive things are called Microaggressions (a term in use since the 70’s but enjoying recent resurgence by Millennials) and the response to them is known in psychology as Victimhood Culture. There is (or was, prior to the election) widespread acceptance by liberal and conservative media that this was a negative thing.

The problem is that the line is fuzzy between fighting for victimized people and promoting a victimhood culture. Where does the former stop and the latter start? I offer two signposts for your consideration. First, look at the role of free speech in the debate. Victims and their advocates always rely on free speech and open dialogue to articulate unpopular truths. They rely on free speech to assert their right to speak. Victimhood culture, by contrast, generally seeks to restrict expression in order to protect the sensibilities of its advocates. Victimhood claims the right to say who is and is not allowed to speak. – Arthur C. Brooks, The New York Times

What other groups do you see today looking to restrict expression and free speech in order to protect themselves and others from things that they don’t want to hear?

What social media has done for Victimhood Culture is allow it to have a massively amplified effect, by dramatically increasing the power of Alinsky’s Rules. Specifically Rule 13, which states “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Twitter and other social media outlets are a perfect medium to carry this out. It is trivially easy to swarm and overwhelm any one person or institution on a platform such as Twitter. The initial onslaught is enough to force most people to try and shut down their accounts or issue an apology. This is a mistake, as an admission of guilt is used to force concessions from the individual or the institution. Rather than accepting the apology at face value, the activists will use it to “prove” their point and demand that action be taken to provide justice.

Again, usually this is calls for resignation, firing, expulsion, or other ways of being ostracized and affecting the livelihood/income of the individual targeted. This has happened in dozens of high profile situations like those linked above, and some of the most infamous incidents include Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who was forced to resign after suffering a massive online attack & organized boycott, and several Nobel Prize winning Scientists including DNA pioneer James Watson. More and more frequently, such attacks have resorted to extreme measures, frequently including threats of violence or death, sexual harassment, and doxxing (releasing the personal information of the target and their families, including home addresses, phone numbers, employers, etc).

These tactics have invariably been used by all sorts of people of different political persuasions on the internet in the past but they became the signature methods of the SJWs because they so effectively silence the target/opposition, which is the ultimate goal of Victimhood Culture. And there are a few choice words that have been used with devastating effect by SJWs throughout their short history. You may recognize them.

Racist. Sexist. Homophobic. Xenophobic. And most recently, Islamophobic.

These terms are the main weapons of a Social Justice Warrior attack, but they have invariably been used to describe conservatives for decades. Ronald Reagan has been called a racist and a sexist. Both Bushes as well. Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney didn’t escape the label either. Some Democrats have even admitted that they cried wolf in the past. The use of these terms is immensely widespread amongst the SJWs because they encapsulate the perfect ridicule (Alinksy Rule #5) bomb. Absolutely no one wants to be charged with these labels, and so it generally proves a defensive apologetic response. That is like blood in the water for the attackers, and they honed their skill at such attacks over the years, utilizing the new social media platforms as weapons of mass destruction. There was generally no defense against them, and even the media began to join in. But that was about to change.

Culture Wars, Redux

I need to take a second to explain my background with regards to all of this. I love debate and have been arguing with people about politics and technology online since before the birth of the World Wide Web, when as a young teenager I would participate in Fidonet discussions by dialing into local BBS systems with a modem (ala War Games, or for the younger generation Halt & Catch Fire). I’m an ardent fan of gaming and technology and regularly visit dozens of websites a day that deal with those subjects, and have participated in many of their discussion forums or comment threads. I essentially fall into this category of internet user aptly described by xkcd.

That being said I’ve never been a big social media user and I largely missed the ramp up of SJW style attacks carried out there. As a socially liberal conservative with a dash of libertarianism thrown in, I’ve been a big proponent of the more public victories of the social justice movement such as marriage equality and federal protection from discrimination for LGBT workers.

Starting around 2011 I began to notice a slow but steadily increasing focus on social issues on the gaming and tech sites I frequented. It didn’t really bother me at first because there was an explosion of new sites at the time that were trying to focus on a wider range of tech & culture, and the general trend at the time was for diversification of online media outlets as a seismic shift from traditional mainstream media to online media began in earnest. I did notice that it bothered quite a few other people who would participate in forums and comment sections, with typical responses being along the lines of “What does this article have to do with gaming?” or “Why is this article on x site?”. In my view there was plenty of room for traditional gaming and technology pieces alongside more culture oriented ones.

The gaming/tech media continued to push the envelope and began actively inserting cultural and social justice issues into their traditional coverage, and this is where things began to fall apart. Throughout 2013 and 2014 especially there was a strong social justice bias on dozens of websites that covered gaming and technology (and apparently not due to coincidence). Dozens if not hundreds of articles on misogyny, (lack of) diversity in both games and gamers, and other progressive platform talking points were found everywhere. Consumer backlash against these publications continued to grow, and a familiar theme emerged as those that objected to the injection of social justice into game reviews and news were slandered with labels of racism & sexism. Many sites would simply ban their readers if their comments ran significantly against the editorial slant. This became a widely discussed and debated topic across the internet.

Finally, a singular event set off a firestorm which eventually became known as Gamergate. Gamergate was a hot mess of horrific online harassment, consumer revolt, media scandal, and culture war all rolled into one enormous online mob. It also completely foreshadowed the Trump election victory. I never participated directly in Gamergate but followed it as it consumed the gaming/tech media and eventually the mainstream media to a degree. I was not surprised by it at all, given what I had been seeing over the last few years prior. And in retrospect, it was an inevitable response to the social justice warrior’s aggressive tactics detailed earlier.

Gamergate used the SJW’s own Alinsky-esque tactics against them and represented the first successful revolt against their dominance. It produced some of the alt-right’s biggest stars that became enormously influential during the Trump campaign. These extreme voices along with the harassment campaigns represented only a small portion of gamers, just as the alt-right generally represents a small portion of the Trump movement. But their successful revolt against the social justice warriors and their ability to withstand the typical SJW attack that had brought down so many other people in the past provided the roadmap for a successful pro-Trump social media campaign. It also gave a huge number of people who were fed up with overly aggressive political correctness in schools, media, games, and many other aspects of everyday life an outlet to vent their frustration and anger.

Ironically, it also provided the roadmap for the left’s failure to understand and address the real issues that vast majority of Trump voters had. When Gamergate erupted, the response of the media and the progressives was to simply label the entire movement and anybody associated with it as a hate group, using the familiar words of misogynists, racists, homophobes, etc. They did the same thing with Trump supporters throughout the campaign, and even continue to do so today. So it is illuminating that possibly the single biggest mistake Hillary Clinton made was making her “deplorable” speech, which likely gave Trump the win.

There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” All hell broke loose. George told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre. Things were not the same after that, at least with my voters. I remember wondering whether that moment was like Romney’s 47 percent: a comment during a fund-raiser from which the candidate would never recover, proof that, like Romney, Clinton was an out-of-touch rich person who didn’t really get it. It struck me that many of the people who were considering Trump were just hard-working Americans who wanted better odds for a good life. – Diane Hessan, Boston Globe

The left’s largest mistake during the election was grouping not only Trump but the voters themselves into the same bucket as the alt-right’s most extreme examples. The alt-right itself makes up a tiny portion of all Trump voters, along with equally small portions of white supremacists, white nationalists, KKK, and other groups that by all accounts add up to an incredibly small percentage of Trump voters. Even by using the qualification of “half”, Hillary Clinton alienated at least 30 million people. Because a particular Trump voter or undecided voter leaning towards Trump had no way of determining if they were being included in the “basket” or not, she essentially called all of them deplorables. Meanwhile, they have plenty of valid arguments that were simply ignored.

This sort of mass mischaracterization of entire swaths of the populace is one of the most destructive things that our society does. No side is immune from doing it, and there seems to be strong psychological reasons why Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe (long but very worthwhile link) is such a powerful phenomenon in American politics, but also why very similar but slightly different groups tend to be so antagonistic towards each other.