03:00 Vouch nationalism and bonding among scientists, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143499
14:00 Dutton and Spencer on the Psychology of a Spree Shooter, https://odysee.com/@radix:c/psychology-spree:d
37:30 Rodney Martin joins to talk about Ukraine
45:50 What does Putin want?
53:00 Raising age to buy a gun?
1:10:00 Rodney doesn’t buy into the Great Replacement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theory
1:34:00 Should we embrace globalism and the New World Order to combat climate change?
1:41:00 Norm Macdonald’s Last Stand Up Set Ever, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVvIWK7mZiw
2:02:00 First Man, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Man_(film)
2:04:00 Hollywood is not uniformly Left, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/collision-of-catastrophes?s=r#details
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on The End Of Citizenship (5-30-22)
* The client trusts the lawyer to exert himself on behalf of the client. However, the client not being a lawyer, is not in a position to effectively judge whether the lawyer is properly representing the client or giving the client adequate legal counsel and advice. This is why trust is required in this relationship. Not only is the client suffering from a deficiency in information or inability to make judgments, but the lawyer is a person with
interests as well which the lawyer can advance, potentially, by cheating the client. Another case of an agency relationship is the relationship between a client and a stockbroker. The stockbroker benefits, as the lawyer might, by doing commission work for the client. The stockbroker also advises the client on what work needs to be done. Similarly the lawyer advises a client not only about what legal steps to take but benefits from the client’s decision to take those legal steps that are necessarily costly to the client and beneficial to the lawyer who is paid for carrying out those steps.
* Even lawyers, when they hire other lawyers, want the shark to be an entirely altruistic shark who puts their interests before the shark’s own interests in every respect. And we know that there are some mechanisms for
punishing a lawyer who violates the rules, and that indeed the bar association disbars people, uses its dues to support actions involving the punishment of lawyers, and so forth.
At first glance this seems to have little to do with science. Sharks in science are not sharks on behalf of the interests of a client. But science is also about ambition, score keeping, playing by particular rules of the game, and being a shark in debunking false claims.
* …when an academic program awards a degree or a journal accepts an article, the program or journal assumes a risk that its assurances of adequacy will be found out to be false, and the consequence of error is damage to “reputation,” which translates into a loss of the value of future assurances of the same type. This feature is central—and for this reason, and for convenience, I will retain the term “bonding.”
* …scientists whose achievements are recognized in various ways “accumulate advantage” so that a scientist who has gone to the right schools, published in the right journals, and won the right prizes is more likely to have his achievements cited… at each point of accumulation something has actively been done, at a cost, to create value through reducing risks, specifically by distributing risks to people other than the scientist accumulating the advantages. So the total value of the “product” in question, the science, is not only the ideas, the intrinsic value, but the guarantees that come along with it, in the form of risk bearing actions taken by editors, hiring departments, and prize givers, each of whom has put the value of their journal, department, or prize at risk by their actions. The accumulation of advantage is thus like the accumulation of cosigners to a loan…An established scientist will have passed through many tests, of which the CV is the archaeological record.
* With every advance in centralization the man who uses his hands is brought under subjection by the man who wields the sword or pen. The secretariat begins as the servant and ends as the master, as every executive officer in our dominions laments. It is inevitable. In a loose aggregate of small parts where every family must fend for itself, it is the man whose muscles are hard, w hose hands are deft, and whose judgment sound that is valued most. . . . But when . . . social activities have to be coordinated from a center then it is necessary to pick out the
pure brains, the men who specialize in thinking. For a thinker is really a man who spends his time making other people think as he does, and consequently act as he thinks. (Hocart [1936] 1970: 126)
* Much of literature on the European Community, however, has emphasized the peculiarities of the community as a political form, and concerned itself with the question of how to make the European Community more like traditional models—more federal, or more “democratic.” What I would like to argue instead is that the European Community is a political form that represents an extension of forms of rule that are found in embryonic form elsewhere in the western political tradition that are not “democratic,” and that the emergence of these forms into a practical governing regime tells us more about what is wrong and also historically dead about liberal democracy than the ideal of liberal democracy, used as a standard of evaluation, tells us about the European Community. I will suggest that the vestments of parliamentary democracy are simply misleading about the nature of this regime, and perhaps irrelevant as a standard.
* Hocart commends Tocqueville’s account, in L’ancien Regime Book II, of “the way in which the clerks have gradually bored their way from the center through the whole feudal structure leaving only the shell.” …as regimes change, “those who cannot adapt themselves to change, fade into ceremonial attendants . . . [while] effective power passes into the hands of the clerks.”
* [The EU] is not, as it has sometimes appeared, merely a kind of peculiar executive department of a quasi-state with a quasi-parliament, but rather represents a distinct form of rule with the capacity to supplant liberal democracy… What I will argue, part of the point of the European Community, and perhaps its main point, is to provide an alternative political structure that is capable of dealing with issues that European national liberal democracies have been incapable of dealing with. …specialists and experts, come to replace the political form that existed before centralization and to absorb to themselves functions and features of the national state, or of other less centralized political forms.
* I will argue that the EC is intelligible as its own form of rule, unlike democracy but taking over the functions of democracy. It is a system with a non-democratic, or rather non-majoritarian, ideal of consensual agreement
as the basis of action. It has a political class, which is integrated vertically from the European Union (EU) down to regional bureaucrats, and organized into categories corresponding to highly differentiated bodies of bureaucratic and technical expertise, which take over not only executive functions but also the functions of discussion.
Posted inExpertise|Comments Off on The Politics Of Expertise (2013)
00:00 When Did Intellectuals Stop Supporting The Free Market Of Ideas? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143526
02:00 Economist Ronald Coase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
22:00 John Milton’s Areopagitica, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areopagitica
38:00 Colleges that so want free speech they don’t take federal funds, https://deanclancy.com/a-list-of-colleges-that-dont-take-federal-money/
42:00 People are less interested in truth than in the battle between truth and falsehood?
43:00 Vaush: Illiterate Cringelord Styxhexenhammer666 Complains About “Woke” Climate Activism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2urR8NnaesY
55:00 Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a7CDKqWcZ0
1:15:00 The Ukraine War as reality TV
1:20:00 Stephen Kotkin says the West is best
1:31:00 On Twitter, Russia has already lost the war
1:36:00 Kenneth Brown: Secret Trillionaires, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwDt_qggI4o
1:38:30 A three-part investigative series into the life & death of Carlos Castaneda, https://tricksterpodcast.com/
1:40:00 Oliver Stone and his producer Janet Yang and Carlos Castaneda
1:46:00 Donna Bevan-Lee on love addiction
1:47:30 Under the Banner of Heaven, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven_(TV_series)
Posted inAmerica, Censorship|Comments Off on The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas (5-29-22)
When did this de facto intellectual support for the free market of ideas stop? I think it was after the rise of the internet when university intellectuals had the unpleasant experience of being critiqued by those they regarded as their inferiors? It’s a bit like the press being all for freedom for themselves but not for broadcasters. Intellectuals are all for their own freedom of expression, but not for the masses online.
Another way of phrasing this turn is that as long as intellectuals were fighting their way to the top of the cultural high ground (against the establishment), they needed free speech. But once they arrived at the summit, free speech became something that created more danger for their status than protection.
When you don’t have power, it makes sense to ostensibly put your principles first so people know you’re not a threat to any group with power, you just believe in these abstract doctrines. When you do have power, it makes sense to put your interests first and rejigger your principles afterward if necessary.
It seems like the default position of elite intellectuals today is that we need more censorship.
I define an intellectual as one who makes his living from his ideas. This almost always requires subsidies. Almost nobody has ideas so compelling that they will provide a living on their own.
An academic tells me:
I was shocked about 1999 when I went to a meeting in [the] college of arts and science chairs. They were obsessing with the fact that the young Republicans had invited XYZ [Republican academic] for a talk. They were livid and strategizing on banning her from campus — even though they had zero authority to do any such thing.
That was an eye opener for me. People who should have defended freedom were violently against it. The internet vexes them more. But gives the people who control the major social media a lot of power to “curate.”
It happened in complicated ways. At first the humanities and social sciences were “against” traditional morality as conformism, religious, etc. when the establishment pretended to be attached to it, and maybe was. This even extended to science, where it was OK to be critical, and science too was against these things. With climate change, that changed for science, and people came to think that criticism was immoral and a result of corporate power. Also, as racism and sexism became the theme, anyone who questioned it was racist and sexist. Now it is transgenderism, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. The sphere of acceptable speech shrinks, the moralism increases.
* Nowadays, it seems like many of the people favoring regulation in the market for goods and services do in fact also favor more government regulation of ideas, e.g., campus speech codes and political campaign contribution and spending limits.
* The cynical explanation is that back when Coase was writing, people who wanted lots of government regulation in “economic” affairs felt that the good guys were in charge of that. However, their experience with “speech” regulation was that the bad guys were in charge of that. Prudes, “super-patriots,” anti-black racists, etc. In the world view of most educated people, the left regulated the market for goods and the right regulated the market for ideas.
Now that the good guys often have the power to suppress ideas they don’t like, many who want lots of government regulation are more consistent about applying it to speech also.
* Ann Althouse had an interesting post today about a Chinese law that criminalizes certain speech on the Internet and a Chinese blogger who made a public apology for things he had written. She has either read Coase’s piece or the ideas have made it to her corner of the University of Wisconsin Law School. Near the end:
“Notice the idea that writing on the internet is an addiction, a mental problem that ought to be disparaged. The blogger is an egotist, who pours out verbiage to further inflate his own grandiosity. This isn’t normal speech, but bad speech, and there’s so much of it that what once might have been thought of as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ is flooded with so much tainted merchandise that the government acts wisely to step in with consumer protection measures.”
* I think that you’ve missed Coase’s point in his 1974 AER article, “The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas.” I find it incomprehensible that he would be a proponent of regulating speech. Indeed , he is quite caustic about the regulation of advertising. Rather, he is holding up to ridicule the shortcomings of regulation in the market for goods by showing how the free market for ideas functions without regulation. Thus, he is critiquing the failures of regulating the market for goods by comparison the groping, competitive approach to truth in the market for ideas. This can be seen in three separate aspects of his argument in the 1974 piece:
1. The comparison of the regulatory failures of goods regulation;
2. His quotation of Aaron Director that free speech is “the only area where laissez-faire is
still respectable.”
3. The distinction that free speech is protected by a contractual (social) imposition—the Bill of Rights—which was a key to the ratification of the Constitution—an agreement that conditioned several states’ ratification of the Constitution.
But the biggest giveaway is that Coase, the beneficiary of a classic English education, did not quote the strongest proponent of free speech, J.S. Mill (On Liberty). Mill argued that Truth is often unknowable, a priori, and that the best approximation to finding it emerges from free and open competition—a prescription for logical positivism. His argument is strengthened by Thomas Kuhn’s argument about systems of investigation and theory—that often the stronger argument is impeded by the success of the accepted truth or conventional wisdom. Rather, as you note, he quoted John Milton whose moronic assertion—for someone who’d just lived through the English Civil War—that “…who ever knew Truth put the worse in a free and open encounter.” Thus, the response to Milton’s question would include at least the following three examples for which much time and scientific advance, (sustained by free speech) were required:
• Ptolemaic earth-centric was able to predict the positions of the planets and stars by an adjustment that was not necessary for its successor, the Copernican helio-centric system;
• Darwin’s theory of evolution was impeded by religious arguments that were irrelevant to its explanations and hypotheses;
• Newtonian mechanics was shown to be an approximation to the more general structure of Einstein’s relativistic structure.
So, I think that Coase was using an implicit argument against regulation, specifically of the regulation of goods markets, not advocating it for the market for ideas.
I think that it is infeasible to separate the regulation of speech from their expression in the property rights of their ideas. An interesting example of this is entailed in a possible forthcoming appeal to the Supreme Court; the appeal addresses the convction for fraud by a publication of a result in a cancer cure that did not meet the standard 5% criterion (P-value). The scientist (published in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2004) focused on sub-groups for which the protocol was effective (P%>5%), but selected from an overall experimental sample that did not achieve this; yet the sub-group/post experirmental selection was explicitly described in the published article. The proponent/chief scientist was prosecuted and convicted of fraud—he stood to gain from his ownership in a pharmaceutical company that owns the drug [The whole story is spun out in the Washington Post Health&Science section, Tuesday 24 September—David Brown, “The Jury Said Guilty, but What Did He Do?”].
This is an example illustrating that regulating speech—the law of fraud under which the scientist was convicted—also restricts ideas, the published experiments and reported results. I think that unlike physical property, where the bundle of rights can be sorted and some restricted—eg, zoning laws—that for ideas, the restriction of speech almost inevitably restricts the communication of the underlying ideas, thus impeding J.S. Mill’s process of competition—the groping for truth. Hence, such restriction is socially as well as economically inefficient.
BTW, in a perhaps unintentional irony, the lead article in today’s referenced Washington Post Health&Science section, is an article by a retired cardiologist whose brain tumor has been successfully treated by an experimental drug, not yet licensed—Fritz Anderson,” My Tumor, My Journey.”
* the difference in view about the role of government in these two markets is really quite extraordinary and demands an explanation… The paradox is that government intervention which is so harmful in the one sphere becomes beneficial in the other. The paradox is made even more striking when we note that at the present time it is usually those who press most strongly for an extension of government regulation in other markets who are most anxious for a vigorous enforcement of the First Amendment prohibitions on government regulation in the market for ideas…
[Aaron] Director’s gentle nature does not allow him to do more than hint at it: “A superficial explanation for the preference for free speech among intellectuals runs in terms of vertical interests. Everyone tends to magnify the importance of his own occupation and to minimize that of his neighbor. Intellectuals are engaged in the pursuit of truth, while others are merely engaged in earning a livelihood. One follows a profession, usually a learned one, while the other follows a trade or a business.” I would put the point more bluntly. The market for ideas is the market in which the intellectual conducts his trade. The explanation of the paradox is self-interest and self-esteem. Self-esteem leads the intellectuals to magnify the importance of their own market. That others should be regulated seems natural, particularly as many of the intellectuals see themselves as doing the regulating. But self-interest combines with self-esteem to ensure that, while others are regulated, regulation should not apply to them. And so it is possible to live with these contradictory views about the role of government in these two markets.
That this is the main explanation for the dominance of the view that the market for ideas is sacrosanct is certainly supported if we examine the actions of the press. The press is, of course, the most stalwart defender of the doctrine of freedom of the press, an act of public service to the performance of which it has been led, as it were, by an invisible hand. If we examine the actions and views of the press, they are consistent in only one respect: they are always consistent with the self-interest of the press. Consider their argument that the press should not be forced to reveal the sources of its published material. This is termed a defense of the public’s right to know-which is interpreted to mean that the public has no right to know the source of material published by the press. To desire to know the source of a story is not idle curiosity. It is difficult to know how much credence to give to information or to check on its accuracy if one is ignorant of the source. The academic tradition, in which one discloses to the greatest extent possible the sources on which one relies and thus exposes them to the scrutiny of one’s colleagues, seems to me to be sound and an essential element in the search for truth. Of course, the counterargument of the press is not without validity. It is argued that some people would not express their opinions honestly if it became known that they really held these opinions. But this argument applies equally to all expressions of views, whether in government, business, or private life, where confidentiality is necessary for frankness. However, this consideration has commonly not deterred the press from revealing such confidences when it was in their interest to do so. Of course, it would also impede the flow of information to reveal the sources of the material published in cases in which the transmission of the information involved a breach of trust or even the stealing of documents. To accept material in such circumstances is not consistent with the high moral standards and scrupulous observance of the law which the press expects of others. It is hard for me to believe that the main thing wrong with the Watergate affair was that it was not organized by the New York Times.
Posted inCensorship, Journalism|Comments Off on When Did Intellectuals Stop Supporting The Free Market Of Ideas?
I just Googled the phrase “Vouch Nationalism”, and there were no results.
I want to start something new.
This is my gift to the world on my 56th birthday.
I propose that if you want to legally own a gun, the easiest way for you to do this would be to to have ten law-abiding adults with spotless records (including when they were minors) vouch for you. If you choose not to go this way, the state can come up with more onerous rules to incentivize people to form and maintain ties with upstanding citizens if they want certain privileges.
If you want to have a kid with generous support from the state, you should have to have ten law-abiding adults vouch for you and your spouse.
If you behave badly with a gun, or your kids behave badly so that they become a burden for the state, those who vouched for you should have to pay a stiff price.
If you want to have kids without anyone vouching for you, you should have to pay an extra $10,000 a year in taxes as social insurance.
When I renewed my passport in Australia, I had to get a fair dinkum Australian who was not family to vouch for me.
We’re too individualist a society. We need to go in a more corporate direction. Vouching might be the way to go. If people don’t want to get the required number of vouches, then they should have to endure the onerous consequences.
If you want to drive a car, you should have to get ten adults with clean records to vouch for you, and if you become a social hazard, those who vouched for you should be on the hook to clean up the mess.
Big cities may want to up vouch requirements given that anti-social behavior, particularly with guns and cars, may have more devastating effects on more people than those who live in isolated areas.
With vouch nationalism, people will be strongly incentivized to build and maintain ties with others. People should be allowed to withdraw their vouches at any time (and thus reduce the penalty that accrues to them if those they vouched for behave badly), and so people will be incentivized to get many people to vouch for them and stay vouching for them when the vicissitudes of life cause original vouchers to drop away.
Perhaps this could apply to livestreaming and posting on the major social media platforms. If you want to livestream on Youtube, for example, you should have to have a certain number of adults with clean records vouch for you.
Perhaps there should be whole swathes of society that you can only enter if you have ten vouches behind you. Perhaps locales should be allowed to set a minimum number of vouches to enter. Perhaps you should have to have 25 vouches to enter Manhattan or 15 vouches to fly to Los Angeles. Imagine how awesome it would be to go on vacation to a place that requires 30 vouches. It would be a touch of heaven. Knowing you were in a city that required a high number of vouches, you could walk around at night, and leave your phone on the beach when you go swimming. You’ll feel more incentivized to build social trust and social cohesion and social capital. You might even feel like volunteering.
Comment: “Couldn’t I just pay someone to vouch for me? Also what if one of the vouchers decide to retract their vouch? Not to mention, how do you know the vouches are legit? Who vouches for the vouches?”
Yes, you could, but you would have to pay a lot of money because the people who vouch for you will be on the hook for your behavior. If one of your vouchers decides to retract, and you have an excess of people vouching for you, it won’t matter, but if you drop below the required number of vouchers, the police will be notified.
The more people who vouch for you, the higher your social credit score. You could post on Facebook and watch your credit with people rise or fall. If you get a speeding ticket, are delinquent paying your taxes, get convicted of a crime, your social credit score would fall. People with low social credit may be restricted from certain privileges such as flying on a plane, leaving the house at night, traveling beyond 10 miles from their home, etc. They could rebuild their credit by taking vouch education classes where they learn social skills.
I think the number of people willing to vouch for you will roughly line up with your credit score. If we restricted gun ownership to only people with 800 plus credit score, we’d have fewer murders.
People with a high social credit score should be able to get lower interest loans and be more sought after in employment. We could get apps on our phone notifying us of the social credit scores of people nearby, and we could get an emergency beep if someone with a low score is approaching.
People could make their vouches dependent on certain variables, such as a person maintaining a minimum of 20 vouches, that way your vouch risk is shared and reduced and when certain conditions aren’t met, your vouch goes away. Many employers and employees might vouch for each other during the length of the employment. Members of a congregation might vouch for each other as long as each is regular in attendance and commitment. A rabbi might vouch for you if you attend minyan every morning. Business partners might vouch for each other as long as they’re in business together. A therapist might vouch for a client as long as the client stays in therapy. Members of a 12-step group might vouch for each other as long as they’re active. A 12-step sponsor might vouch for sponsee who complete Step Nine.
This could lead to some wonderful conversations, such as, “You say you’re my mate, but you won’t vouch for me. Why?”
People will get clarity about the strength of their relationships.
On the other hand, if 30 or more people who live or have lived within ten miles of you vouch against you, this could trigger an investigation of your fitness to own weapons.
Vouch nationalism is a bit like how science works through bonding. Stephen Turner wrote in his 2013 book The Politics of Expertise:
*…when an academic program awards a degree or a journal accepts an article, the program or journal assumes a risk that its assurances of adequacy will be found out to be false, and the consequence of error is damage to “reputation,” which translates into a loss of the value of future assurances of the same type. This feature is central—and for this reason, and for convenience, I will retain the term “bonding.”
…scientists whose achievements are recognized in various ways “accumulate advantage” so that a scientist who has gone to the right schools, published in the right journals, and won the right prizes is more likely to have his achievements cited… at each point of accumulation something has actively been done, at a cost, to create value through reducing risks, specifically by distributing risks to people other than the scientist accumulating the advantages. So the total value of the “product” in question, the science, is not only the ideas, the intrinsic value, but the guarantees that come along with it, in the form of risk bearing actions taken by editors, hiring departments, and prize givers, each of whom has put the value of their journal, department, or prize at risk by their actions. The accumulation of advantage is thus like the accumulation of cosigners to a loan…An established scientist will have passed through many tests, of which the CV is the archaeological record.
I was inspired to this line of thinking by a May 26, 2022 essay in The Atlantic:
My purpose here is to point out a logical third option, one that can and should be tested out on a platform such as Twitter. In this approach, a platform would require users to form groups through free association, and then to post only through those groups, with the group’s imprimatur…
Platforms like Facebook and Reddit have similar structures—groups and subreddits—but those are for people who share notifications and invitations to view and post in certain places. The groups I’m talking about, sometimes called “mediators of individual data” or “data trusts,” are different: Members would share both good and bad consequences with one another, just like a group shares the benefits and responsibilities of a loan in microlending. This mechanism has emerged naturally to a small degree on some of the better, smaller subreddits and even more so on the software-development platform GitHub. A broader movement incorporating this idea, called “data dignity,” has emerged in spots around the world, and in nascent legal frameworks. My proposal here is to formalize the use of data trusts in code, and bake them into platforms.
Groups, as they appear on existing platforms, can be of any size. Some number in the millions. The sort of groups I have in mind would be much smaller as a rule. The point is that the people in the groups know one another well enough to take on the pursuit of trust and quality, and to rid their groups of bots. Perhaps the size limit should be in the low hundreds, corresponding to our cognitive ability to keep track of friends and family. Or maybe it should be smaller than that. It’s possible that 60 people, or even 40 people, would be better. I say, test these ideas. Let’s find out.
Whatever its size, each group will be self-governing. Some will have a process in place for reviewing items before they are posted. Others will let members post as they see fit. Some groups will have strict membership requirements. Others might have looser standards. It will be a repeat of the old story of people building societal institutions and dealing with unavoidable trade-offs, but people will be doing this on their own terms.
What if a bunch of horrible people decide to form a group? Their collective speech will be as bad as their individual speech was before, only now it will be received in a different—and better—social-cognitive environment. Nazi magazines existed before the internet, but they labeled themselves as such, and were not confused with ambient social perception.
We perceive our world in part through social cues. We rely on people around us to help detect danger and steer attention.
But the gunman did not act in a vacuum. He saw himself as part of an engaged, active community. In the lengthy online manifesto being examined by authorities, he situated his alleged crimes as part of a larger movement. Part of the document is written in a conversational question-and-answer format. It includes sections with titles like “what do you encourage us to do?” and exhaustively cites his “many influences from others” about how to take violent action to prevent white Americans from being “replaced” by Jews, immigrants, and people of color. Dozens of pages lay out a clear instruction manual for the next attacker to follow.
“I think that live streaming this attack gives me some motivation in the way that I know that some people will be cheering for me,” the alleged gunman’s manifesto states. After driving several hours to a grocery store chosen for the high percentage of Black residents in his area, he donned a military-style helmet with a GoPro camera attached, which he used to broadcast the massacre for several minutes.
To analysts of racially-motivated extremism, the Buffalo shooting highlights one of the most pernicious and poorly understood aspects of the recent wave of domestic terrorist attacks. Even when crimes like these are committed by solitary extremists, the perpetrators see themselves as acting on behalf of a movement. “There is a community of like-minded individuals that give these people strength and make them feel like they’re part of a greater cause,” says Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security senior analyst who authored a 2009 report warning of the rise of right-wing and white supremacist extremism. “And when you have that sense of community, it makes your cause seem more legit.”
For a new generation of extremists, this online engagement with white-supremacist movements has taken the place of formal affiliations, group meetings and plots, former officials and experts say. But it should be taken just as seriously. Manifestos circulate from attacker to attacker, who build on and claim allegiance to one another while laying out the playbook for the next violent act.
The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto is covered in anti-Semitic and racist memes and disinformation, making it tempting to characterize it as the delusional ravings of a madman. But such documents, however abhorrent, need to be understood as part of a coherent political ideology, former U.S. extremism officials and experts tell TIME—one whose reach extends far beyond fringe Internet forums. About 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace white Americans with immigrants for electoral gains, according to a new poll, which is the root of the “replacement theory” cited by the Buffalo attacker.
That’s why portraying individuals like the Buffalo shooter as lone extremists whose self-radicalization on the Internet led them to commit inexplicable, “evil” acts divorces their actions from the larger movement they belong to. “We shouldn’t be dismissing these people as mentally ill or just a one-off,” Johnson tells TIME. “There are many, many people out there that are on a spectrum of radicalization following each other’s path.”
Posted inNationalism|Comments Off on Vouch Nationalism
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
