twitter – Jonesy's Place

Online Libs are addicted to pointing out the right’s hypocrisy. They love it to death. Sure, it’s often warranted and satisfying, but it’s ultimately pointless and played out. Plenty of progressives, leftists, and media critics have caught onto this game and have offered a range of insight into the impotent, masturbatory, but most importantly, misguided nature of it. It’s a worthy topic for thought, especially if you’re the type, for example, to think you’ve “destroyed” some evangelical bigot by telling him he isn’t Christ-like. Trust me, he knows. And he’ll have an asinine retort or scripture passage to respond with, and he doesn’t care anyway. That’s the point. He’s not playing the same game you are.

This post isn’t mean to dive into that idea. It’s already been tackled by people much more talented and thorough than I am. But the semi-recent and massive increase anti-trans hysteria, accompanied by a growing wave of restrictive and brutal bills in state houses throughout the country, has gotten me thinking about a tangential aspect of The Discourse: most of the Online Right aren’t just hypocritical in their views and eager to deploy an array of absurd lies to support them. Rather, they’re simply lying when they tell you what they think and believe. And to varying degrees, I think most know it themselves.

To get something out of the way, I like to think it’s obvious I’m not talking about the rare few who openly admit to their bigotries or “-isms” of choice, as heinous and jarring as they might be. Most people across the ideological spectrum like to think they’re the Good Guys, or at the very least, will attempt to convince others of this conviction. One would reasonably think it should be easy to default to some sort of fundamental values or ideological framework when defending a belief or statement from criticism. These are the reactionaries I am talking about, and this is where they run into trouble, when they cannot honestly counter any good-faith critique. To use transgender rights as an example, I would simply and honestly state that someone’s personal and intimate experience should respected without interference from the state when it comes to the care they need to live their preferred gender expression. But even though they believe the opposite, you are unlikely to see a right winger explicitly state it as such – that they do believe it is critical for government to intervene in such personal matters in order to maintain a direct sex and gender binary in its citizens. So, they have to frame it differently to hide that fundamental belief.

Regardless of whether they’re aware of the internal hypocrisy, they know it sounds bad. There’s no escaping the implication of these beliefs, as evidenced by the actual content of the bills being proposed and passed. Thus, the belief has to be masked by concern-trolling language, laundered through faux compassion for children or women. Perhaps even the old “just asking questions” gambit. This just kicks the can down the street a little: why assume kids cannot understand the basics of gender expression? Why the leap to the conclusion that LGBT+ education/exposure is grooming? Why paint all of cis womanhood as threatened by or opposed to transgender people? This is all just more ugliness, often being passed off as “concern” of some sort, and to engage with it is to become mired down in a debate that allows bigots to claim some level of legitimacy and prudence. Essentially, they could argue that the very existence of this heated discussion is reason enough to warrant respect for their views as something that isn’t just simple prejudice or outright hatred. But it’s not an honest discussion on the matter: it’s a fight started and fueled by people who deny others’ humanity. It’s not a reasonable discussion on a matter, such as education policy around gender expression, or more banal details around how transgender rights could be outlined. It truly does boil down to a fight over the right for certain, innocent people to simply exist as they wish. And the people who oppose them know this, despite whatever watered down rhetoric or outright obfuscation they deploy.

My focus on transphobia is the result of the current moment, but this brand of dishonest sadism-masquerading-as-concern is prevalent. A few years ago there was a frenzy over the pressure to remove public monuments of Confederate officials and military figures. The conservative pushback included fears of “erasing history,” as if these statues were crucial to education and knowledge to begin with. The lie had to be deployed to cover for the obviously icky alternative of having to admit appreciation for the Confederacy’s pro-slavery enemies, or at the very least functioned as a lazy attempt to avoid the essentially impossible task of defending the purpose and value of such public monuments. Thus, “you can’t erase history” is “the Confederacy wasn’t bad (enough).”

The anti-abortion (“pro-life”) movement is another fascinating example. While there is room for some more nuance here, particularly for the seemingly rare true-believers whose activism is displayed as near universal compassion extending well beyond the issue of abortion, much of the movement’s reasoning can be translated to its true, dishonest meaning and dismissed accordingly. Skipping past some obvious surface level hypocrisies – violent rhetoric, frequent support for the death penalty, and near total cultural overlap with support for war and imperialism – their lies are exposed when they reflexively oppose essentially every policy or personal practice proposed in the name of reducing the frequency of unwanted pregnancies. Universal healthcare/childcare, wealth redistribution, the morning after pill, birth control/condoms, public housing, and social spending in general, all of which comprise a very literal pro-life ideology, are pooh-poohed to varying degrees by the majority of the anti-abortion movement. Some states’ anti-abortion laws are even restrictive of abortive procedures that are functionally life-saving interventions for the mothers, or grief-reducing for expectant parents when the fetus is known to be unviable. But, because “nobody is allowed to do this because my religion (supposedly) forbids it” is such a weak and obviously unjust line of reasoning, abortion opponents have to label both their philosophy “pro-life” and the practice itself as “killing babies” to sell it.

One could spend a lifetime discussing the range of issues the conservative worldview softens and legitimizes through this bad faith style of expression. The rapacious and vulgar conquest of other lands is cleaned up as “spreading democracy and fighting terror.” Brutalizing and displacing the already-immiserated unhoused population is just “cleaning up the streets.” Turning a blind eye (or even openly supporting) appalling police misconduct sounds better as “back the blue.” Just a few moments’ honest inspection on nearly every hot button issue yields fascinating and revealing beliefs and behaviors. We could do this all day.

As I alluded to earlier, all of this is done not only to clean up and give legitimacy to flagrantly undignified beliefs, it’s also a stubborn and lazy way to effectively shut down all room for nuance on a given topic. Yes, the space for discussion and debate on matters will always be open, but this type of exaggeration and lying can often force entire discussions into idiotic and unnecessary binaries. There is no room left for the nuances, imperfections, and natural difficulties and imperfections inherent in the debate over any policies relevant to so-called “hot button” issues. In fact, conservatives will often only acknowledge or cite the imperfections of left-minded policies in service of their own preferred policies, even when the negative outcomes of right-wing policy are far worse by any relevant measure. To use the topic of transgender medical care again, stories of people de-transitioning or regretting gender-affirming surgery are a go-to cudgel for the “gender critical” crowd, cited with a straight face in comparison to the much larger number of people who transitioned without regret and lived much more happily as a direct result. If they truly cared for those unfortunate few gender dysphoria patients with heartbreaking regret, the focus would be on the care these people need instead of the transgender community at large, against whom these stories are deployed with cynicism and contempt.

In my view, what this all means is that leftist/progressive/liberal minded people ought to focus less on the easy “gotcha” of pointing out hypocrisy, instead pointedly identifying the true beliefs underlying the more odious and damaging lines of conservative discourse. Hypocrisy is ultimately just a rhetorical concept, an interesting and narrowly useful one that should take a back seat to the material relevance of the issues and policies we argue about. Perhaps we should seek for ways to engage with argumentative conservatives, civilly and in good faith, on this basis. It’s already uncomfortable (for most of us) to argue and debate many of these things with people we find difficult, who say things we find distasteful and even abhorrent. So why not take the effort to make these moments more meaningful and refuse to let conservative opponents off the hook? Instead, focus on what they are really saying. Make sure they know that we know what they’re saying. Maybe they’ll finally be faced with the choice to truly defend their beliefs on their own merits, or come to terms with and finally begin to turn away from the inherent ugliness of their views.

I know a lot of us really enjoy ourselves some hyperbole, and that Twitter discourse does not smoothly align with what happens in real-life. But I quickly developed a sense of having stumbled upon something definitive and decisive about Trump-era liberalism when I saw the following tweet:

It’s difficult to begin to fully describe everything maddening and pathetic about that statement, but since this is a blog post about it, I’m gonna try.

This tweet is like a fully evolved iteration of the feckless “If Hillary Won, We’d Be At Brunch Right Now” signs that have appeared at various marches since 2017. It’s a sort of culmination of the #Resistance™ that began in earnest following the 2016 presidential election, the groundwork having been laid by prominent liberal political and media figures who essentially anointed themselves leaders of a movement to defy the oncoming storm of a Trump Administration. And while it’s an absolute necessity to generate massive resistance to the grotesque nature of Trump’s agenda, the mainstream liberal face of the movement was lacking in substance and value from the very start. To put it most succinctly, they took Trump’s election personally and never expanded the reaction much beyond this feeling of being inconvenienced and generally upset.

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, an intellectual fraud inexplicably respected among the online-right, has long had a fondness for “owning the libs” with the catchphrase “facts don’t care about your feelings.” He and many like him just love to label anyone expressing compassion as a bleeding-heart snowflake, too prone to fits of emotion in the face of the muscle-flexing juggernaut that is Logic. But rather than serving as a general axiom for navigating the difficulties of everyday life, conservatives of Shapiro’s ilk just use “facts don’t care about your feelings” as a double-ended bludgeon: to claim that factual reality necessitates conservative policy and that human emotion is a sign of flaws and weakness. It doesn’t much matter what the topic at hand is, conservatives will shoehorn the facts-versus-feelings dynamic in wherever it suits their ideology. Does a relatively small number of mega-wealthy elites exert too much power and drive catastrophic income inequality? Too bad, they earned their position in the world and you’re a pussy for crying about it. Are you concerned about the US government’s violent, cruel, and careless foreign policy? Tough luck, we’re fighting for freedom and civilian casualties are just the cost of doing business in a world of good versus evil. This exercise could drag on considerably, but the key flaw in this Facts & Logic fetishism is that the right often relies on premises that are far from factual, often open for debate, and sometimes even foundationally bullshit. What this approach typically represents is them claiming the Land of Logic in the name of the right and then reverse-engineering their own preset feelings into what they conveniently consider to be the facts that support them.

None of this is to say that facts have no place in a world that should be dominated by feelings. I go to a weekly support group modeled after Recovery International, a self-help mental health organization founded by neuropsychiatrist Dr. Abraham Low in 1937. Among the many tools and guides in the program is the phrase “feelings are not facts.” At first glance this seems uncomfortably similar to Ben Shapiro’s guiding principle. But rather than functioning as a weaponized statement, “feelings are not facts” is intended to calm and empower people who struggle with a variety of mental and emotional struggles. Just because you feel worthless or hopeless or doomed doesn’t make it true. If you avoid social situations for fear of judgment or humiliation, it would help to know it is by no means a fact that everyone is closely watching you and waiting for an opportunity to criticize you. That odd or uncomfortable physical symptom you may be experiencing, or disturbing mental state does not automatically mean you are dying of some awful disease or losing your mind. This is the uplifting perspective on the facts versus feelings dynamic, the use of rational thought to ease tension instead of attempting to deflect all criticism and reframe it as emotional immaturity.

Maybe this all sounds like a “both sides!” detour from the subject, but almost immediately upon reading this tweet I got a sense of a real snag in this user’s facts and feelings priorities. I don’t dismiss the seething hatred this man feels. I cannot begin to recall all the times I’ve caught myself pacing around angrily in my house, ruminating on some new horror the Trump administration has brought into being. I agree that it’s miserable to feel this way, however naturally it may come. But I’m more interested in what informs such feelings and how they are expressed. What is the primary issue? Is it the dark, helpless negativity you feel? Are you the victim here, BrooklynDad? And “when it’s over” will equilibrium be reestablished by your “soul cleanse?” Is the Trump presidency an aberration bookmarked by eras of happy normalcy?

It may seem petty and nit-picky but this brand of faux-liberal, centrist narcissism consistently seems to ignore the primary victims not only of Trump’s policies but of American policy in general. A lot of us are profoundly upset and disturbed by this administration’s actions, from the separation of immigrant families, the imprisonment of children in literal concentration camps, complete disregard for catastrophic climate change, continued reckless use of military terror abroad, racism, sexism, assault on LGTBQ rights, disgraceful tax policies, and the constant, full-throated, pathetic stream of lies. I think some of those could vie for the honor of “WORST thing” of Trump’s presidency. And they qualify for that distinction not because of how they make me, or anyone else, feel, but because they are de facto morally repugnant and cause grave material harm to broad swaths of people. To varying degrees, his ideology and behaviors are bad purely because they drive death, destruction and decay. And even though Feeling Bad is the natural response to such matters, that bad feeling is a side-effect, a reaction.

Ideally, I believe a person’s values will drive their emotional reactions to the reality (facts) they encounter or experience. And the behaviors driven by those emotional reactions are, in my opinion, most revealing of a person’s values. Are you going to go on social media to post emotional screeds about how the president hurts your feelings, or are you going to center the primary victims of his policies when you discuss him? Are you going to engage the moral roots of destructive policy or are you going to find a way to twist it into a cathartic “YAAAS KWEEN” viral tweet to get Likes and Retweets from legions of wine moms and #StillWithHer drones? To put it in the clearest terms, when you criticize and excoriate the Trump (or any powerful figure), are you centering his victims or are you putting yourself on the cross?

I don’t mean to portray Twitter discourse as the crucial foundation of social struggle. I am fully aware that most of us Online People are little more than keyboard jockeys duking it out with varying levels of elevated self-importance. And while there is no substitute for protests, demonstrations, and other forms of direct action, I do believe that the way we communicate and express ourselves in all forums and mediums does carry some importance. I think it’s a safe assumption that aside from voting, for most of us our primary political engagement (in the US, at least) comes in the form of social media participation and consumption. And while that may not seem significant taken at face value, the ideas communicated and absorbed can have a significant influence when spread among enough minds over time. And as those things evolve and disperse, so do the minds of all of us engaged in it, which can create an atmosphere of more significant and substantial resistance, inspire more direct action, and strengthen the resolve of The People to demand the justice and respect we all deserve. So try not to focus on feeling bad for yourself. Take the next step and let yourself be an ally for those directly targeted and harmed. On large enough scale, it can foster the solidarity we need to counter our oppressors in ways they cannot stave off.