by wonkie
I’ve had thoughts rattling around in my head about hate speech, stochastic violence, and relationships with friends and neighbors. I haven’t come to a conclusion yet. Perhaps we can discuss this here. I’m interested in what you all think.
I’ll start with a little story: I used to spar politically with a neighbor who was also a Facebook friend. He frequently started the convos off by posting something awful on FB—he was a consumer of the worst kind of rightwing crap. I’d respond in the comments with facts. After some exchanges, he’d climb down a bit from his original positions. I was always polite and posted a lot of links. He was often rude and accusatory toward Democrats in his initial posting, but backed off after discussion.
We kept this up for quite a while, but I found myself getting increasingly angry toward him, given the backdrop of national events. I think it was the lies about the election and J6 that pushed me over the edge. I started thinking that I just wasn’t willing to be any kind of enabler for stochastic violence anymore, and maybe my convos with him were a kind of enabling. After all, no matter how much shit he threw, I never threw it back, and he kept on throwing it. I never said, “Stop that. You are behaving badly.” I treated it all as if we were having a discussion of ideas, an exchange of opinions.
My change in attitude was partly me wanting to behave morally but also me wanting to vent and punish.
Anyhoo, he posted on my page an article about Democrats supporting infanticide. I told him that the accusation was false, that he should’ve recognized it as false, and he shouldn’t have posted a false accusation on my page. I asked him to apologize. He didn’t. I mentioned this to my husband who said, “Don’t take it personally.”
I thought about it and decided that it was personal. I am a Democrat. When someone hatemongers toward all Democrats, they are including me. I am at risk of getting shot while attending a public event. It is fucking personal.
I told my sparring partner that we were no longer friends if he couldn’t apologize. He didn’t, we aren’t.
Meanwhile, my postings on FB got a lot more overtly hostile toward the R party. Where in the past I used to say “rightwingers”, I now say “Republican politicians and spokes people”. I use the word “lie”. I have posted specific actions by specific people and labeled the actions as fascist. I routinely refer to King Pussygrabber as a fascist and as stupid and corrupt while posting factual articles about specific things he has done or said.
Am I crossing the line into hate speech? I think not, since I’ve what said about him can be defended based on observable, measurable actions he’s taken—except the “stupid”. (I think he’s stupid, but it isn’t provable). He bragged about grabbing pussy.
So next episode in this drama: Another neighbor, Anne, posted brief statement that Kirk was being misquoted by “the left” and smeared. I know my neighbor is very religious. She is also a sweet person and we are on friendly terms. We share many common interests. She has put up with my open hostility on FB toward the Republican party without comment.
But Charlie fucking Kirk organized a hate campaign against my sister’s church which subjected the congregation and her, as the office person who read their church emails, to weeks of obscenities and death threats. They had to hold their services at a different site for a while. That’s fucking personal.
Besides, it doesn’t matter if the hatemongering is personal or not. The intention is to harm someone, so shouldn’t we all fight to protect the harmed?
So I posted in a comment on Anne’s post the story about how Kirk attacked the church.
Her response was to comment that my story was not true.
I wrote back that I knew how disappointing it can be when an admired person has feet of clay and reiterated that the story was true. I told her that my sister was willing to discuss it with her.
No response.
I’m feeling guilty about this. I’m feeling guilty that I upset her and, clearly, she is upset.
I’m good at fighting. Other people aren’t and I think Anne isn’t.
So…what to do when an acquaintance participates in stochastic violence?
One decision I’ve made is to monitor myself to be careful that what I post is intended to be informational and not vengeful. For example, I shared a post on Daily Caller today. I shared it as an example of stochastic violence because Walshe advocates for the execution of the mayor of Chicago and extends his claim about the mayor to the whole Democratic party. His premise is that the mayor and Democrats in general are pro-crime. I did comment on the post that the Republican party, since Karl Rove’s day, has used stochastic violence as a tactic.
I am also continuing to post quotes from Kirk but I am posting the original videos so the quotes can be heard completely and in context.
I will be friendly to Anne and I hope she continues to be friendly to me.
How do you all handle this?
I remain a registered Democrat. However, here in Colorado we recently passed the point where more than half of all registered voters are registered as “unaffiliated”. My first reaction when I read the story in the local paper was to wonder if people were hiding from the nastiness.
I don’t do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it’s not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.
https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/beyond-facts-the-identity-politics
This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.
If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.
We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.
That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.
While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging – getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.
Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: “RL is not my best window.”
The second – better media literacy – is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn’t really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.
And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.
Thank you for your thoughtful in depth response. I think my neighbor was really shocked by an attack on a Christian church–that definitely rattled her world view. I don’t know if there’s any change in her attitude toward Kirk because she has gone silent.
I have another rightwing friend that I met through the community of dog rescuers. Her instinct is to be a racist. She calls herself a conservative and is very responsive to Republican messages that trigger her tendency to “Other” everyone else. The one exception is that she dislikes intensely religious conservatives. She is a racist, not of the N-word type, but of the type that very readily believes any negative generality applied to all immigrants who aren’t white.
The Republican party has built a community around “othering”. My theory is that they are appealing to an instinctive behavior hardwired into humans from clear back in caveman days when “our” little band of cave people were in competition for territory and resources with “yours”, a competition that could be put aside sometimes for interbreeding or cooperation on a hunt, but still an embedded sense that people like me are a group and people unlike me are inherently scary.
I’ve talked my dog rescue friend down from anti-immigrant hysteria several times but it takes very little for her to revert. She consumes Republican hate propaganda all the time.
I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I’m fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.
There are a couple of people – long time friends – that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven’t really brought up facts etc. I just say “I have no use for Trump, he’s an asshole and a crook.” Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They’re not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.
Once in a while I’ll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn’t get to the point of something like conversation. It’s more you stated your position, I’ve stated mine, and move on.
The thing is, I don’t think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn’t support their favorite sports team.
People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they’ll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their “team” identity. They’ll just blame fate, or the “deep state”, or similar.
I really don’t know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that’s been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn’t see that is just picking on them.
I don’t think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda – Project 2025 and stuff like it – happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.
But they’re gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they’re done.
So I’ve kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody’s mind about anything, I’m just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it’s over.
wonkie, this is a subject which I spend a lot of time thinking about. For me, it matters most with personal friends (because I don’t really have a social media presence), and luckily most of mine are roughly on the same page as me, at least about purely political issues. One exception is the Israel/Gaza situation, where someone I have known since she was a child, and whose family was and is deeply entwined with mine, is still (or was still a month or so ago) reflexively defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, although not in the West Bank. She was deeply upset by my attitude and my arguments, and although I kept (civilly) making them for a while (because she is a) bright, b) a liberal/lefty, and c) generally a really good person), I stopped because I do not want her to disappear from my life or that of my family. So we have a truce, and don’t discuss it. The only other friends I know who were supporting Israel wholeheartedly when we last discussed it several months ago, are non-Jewish (unlike the other friend) and rather rightwing. It will be interesting next time we talk about it to see if their attitude has changed at all in the meanwhile. The only thing which gave them pause in our last discussion was my point that Israel’s actions in Gaza have done more damage to Israel than anything I have ever seen in my lifetime.
But on the subject of what kind of effect this sort of extreme argument is having on the participants, I am really worried. I have seen more and more people (including people with whom I agree) becoming more extreme and unempathetic, insulting, even cruel, in their arguments, the longer these kind of things go on. It seems to me a sort of radicalisation: not entirely surprising I suppose in people who have been defined by others in hateful ways, threatened over long periods with e.g physical violence, rape, murder etc because of their opinions, or have seen people they respect so threatened. As well as certain public figures, I have seen this “radicalisation” happen even with a few people to whom I am very close. Personally, I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sure this doesn’t happen to me – I don’t want my opinion to change for any reason other than exposure to new information, or other rational (as opposed to emotional) evolution. I hope I have been reasonably successful, but it is a worry.
And, of course, on a societal level, it is a disaster. We are rapidly becoming a world in which it is impossible to have rational discussions and disagreements on many important subjects. I feel very gloomy about it.
And again, for no reason I can make out, my comment is “awaiting moderation”.
Aha, out of the gulag! It only took about 40 minutes for both to come out.
I know almost nobody who disagrees with me about Trump, so that (luckily) doesn’t arise. The exception is someone fiercely clever who has been my close friend since we were 11, and she is a tribal Republican who actually voted for Trump 3 times. I don’t talk to her about it, because a) I can’t bear to hear what she might say, b) I love her, and also I am worried about her cognitive decline (starting long before Trump). Now let’s see if it’s the gulag again…
WordPress is still holding up comments in moderation and I think that people have to become a ‘subscriber’, so they can enter their username and password. I’m not happy about that, but if I just leave it open, I’m worried about a flood of spam.
I’m glad some others have weighed in. I tend, when in a situation that is uncomfortable, to simply back out the way I came in. In fact, one of the reasons I have spent so much time at ObWi has been to be able to talk about politics with people. Being here in Japan offers a measure of separation, and Japanese usually don’t talk about politics unless pressed and even then, they will often not get too deeply into the weeds. They (or at least the people I am with) also don’t have much in-depth knowledge of particular people or parties, just a larger sense of this party likes this or this spokesperson feels this. Speeches aren’t closely parsed, and problems and fights seem to go into a memory hole.
However, I’ve had a couple situations that parallel yours, though not dealing with politics. My western upbringing wants me to sit them down, try to figure out what the problem is, work to some resolution. However, I never do that, because it never seems to result in a conclusion that is better.
I realize that is probably a big downer and it is no useful advice, and I’m still wrestling with this, especially as I head into retirement and will not have the outlets to meet and talk to people.
I have a lot of friends on the right – people I’ve known since I was a kid. My approach these days is more or less the same as russell’s. I talk about other stuff. A few of them will try to bait me into a debate on whatever topic has them spun up at the moment. It usually prompts me to say something like, just as one example, “Let’s start with this: Do you think global warming is a hoax?” I respond to anything even close to a “yes” with, “There’s no point in talking about this. How about those Phillies?”
I can usually play the argument we would have had in my head, anyway. I know these people.
I think my difficulty is… MAGA is a fascist movement–literally. People who like Prager U, Kirk, or other haters are the moral equivalent of good Germans. And most of the good Germans were, mostly, nice people.
As noted above, they only learn from being hurt themselves and even then the commitment to their groupthink often remains. The core of that groupthink is disrespect for the rest of us.
Actually disrespect isn’t a strong enough word. That friend I had who claimed that Dems supported infanticide, for example. How the hell could he justify believing something that awful about other people? The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us. How are we an existential threat? Because we (fill in the blank with current hater memes). What unites the MAGAs isn’t a set of shared values or support for certain policies; it’s hate for the rest of us.
Just as racists make exceptions for someone they know, MAGAs make exceptions for someone they know. But that nice person who is a good neighbor, a long time friend, goes home and chooses to indulge in hate messaging that makes the rest of us potential targets of violence because of the false claim that we are an existential threat to real true good American values.
Would my neighbor Anne object if I got shot at a protest rally? Probably. Would she object if someone else did? Not if Ingraham or Watters or someone told her that the protester had it coming.
It’s weird to chat and be friendly with someone who would has no trouble seeing people get hauled off to prison in El Salvador or FL, can rationalize women dying of miscarriages, supports voter suppression and gerrymandering, voted for the guy who instigated a violent attack on Congress and who is in fact an existential threat to representative government and fundamental human rights.
I guess I have to remember the line about “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” But I sure as hell am not forgiving to the ones who get elected or get on Faux.
One of the things I think about a lot WRT these conversations is the difference between retributive and restorative justice approaches. For me it’s not a question of whether to forgive or not to forgive, but rather a question of whether or not a path to reconciliation can still exist, and what sort of changes might be required to effect such a reconciliation.
I’m reminded of a passage in Dave Grossman’s On Killing (nota bene, Grossman is not a good person and his research is deeply flawed in my estimation, but not in a way that negates what I’m about to describe). He talks about the Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners, and how Japanese recruits were required to bayonette helpless prisoners in front of their comrades as a way of destroying their old sense of identity and making them feel as if there was no way to redeem themselves in the eyes of their old communities. They were made monstrous in order to be wielded as monsters.
I’m always deeply concerned to try, as much as decency will allow, to leave some path back for reconciliation. It doesn’t have to be (and probably shouldn’t be) a free-and-easy path. They should have to do the work of restoration, of reparation, to earn that reconciliation, but unless we work to keep such a path available I don’t think that we will ever be able to restore the breach.
The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us.
My sense is that MAGA people are generally full of fear.
They’re gonna take my guns. They’re letting a lot of brown people in so that white people are outnumbered. Some Mexican is gonna take my job, or, if you’re white collar, some South Asian is gonna take my job. They’re gonna chop my kid’s genitals off. They’re gonna let great big guys play on my daughter’s soccer team and she’s gonna get run over (my (D) House Rep came out with that one).
There are actually some legitimate concerns in all of the above, and there are sensible conversations to have about them. Those conversations are not available because everybody is so freaking hyped up.
And then there are the folks whose point of view basically my life’s good, I’m making money, I want to keep it that way, and if it means tasering some brown person mowing somebody’s lawn or working in a restaurant kitchen or mopping floors in a hospital, I’m OK with that.
I have a friend who’s an academic, a professor of psychology, who has been involved in this project for a few years trying to find ways to “bridge the divide”. His approach is to get people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to establish some kind of empathetic connection.
My question to him is always, where the hell is that going to happen? And how are you going to scale that to a level that is going to have an actual effect on the situation we find ourselves in?
It’s a mess. I have no solution. Find whatever ways are available to you to mitigate whatever harms you can, and do those.
But I don’t see a path to persuading committed MAGAs to change their minds. Even if it all falls to shit around them, they’ll find a way to blame on somebody, anybody, other than Trump.
He’s their champion, their idol, their savior. That’s no exaggeration.
Just a quick comment here, Russell’s comment had to be approved, but I believe that nous’ comment wasn’t. So whatever nous did and Russell didn’t, that is the key
Name and email saved. Website left blank. Mostly posting from Chrome.
To remarkable degree, Republican messaging uses the precepts set out by Goebbels. One is to give people the thrill of fear, basically something to be outraged about that isn’t real. Kind of like the fun of being scared at a horror movie. For literally decades, Republican messaging has consisted of telling people to be afraid of not-real while also telling them that the real is fake. So “They are going to take your guns!!!!” and “There is no climate change.” War on Christmas, trans kids, white people are going to be a minority!!!! ect. From the safety of their armchairs, life becomes an exciting experience of being scared/outraged over imaginary threats, which is a reinforcing experience. It’s fun. Allows the participant to feel virtuous and vicariously heroic by voting for the party that will smite the evil enemy without ever being in any real danger. Meanwhile, I’m sure that those people worry about real problems, but election after election they vote to fight the imaginary ones.
I think leading Dems are sort of hoping that the economy will be the real problem that breaks through this bullshit and gets enough voters to vote D to give the Dems some power in Congress and at the state level. Hence “kitchen table issues” versus R culture war bullshit. It worked in Sioux City at a special election.
On the other hand, Missouri, which is a hell hole of bad government, just keeps electing Republicans over and over.
I keep thinking of the Depression, when enough voters were suffering enough to give a reform politicians real power. Once the suffering receded to being mostly minorities, that desire for reform and improvement, that desire for government as a service for the common good, started losing elections to “I got mine, screw you, and besides you are just a (fill in the hater crap du jour).”
It is a privilege to be outraged all the time about imaginary shit.
I think my approach is a less formalized version of what nous described. If we disconnect completely and irreparably, the alienation from each other and the dehumanization of each other both become that much easier. That makes people more willing to harm each other in various ways, and that’s dangerous for everyone.
Someone on another thread some time ago brought up one of the ways the divide between sides during The Troubles in Northern Ireland was narrowed. IIRC, it had much to do with talking about things other than politics to rehumanize each other.