“You might start to get that backlash. But just give it right back to them because that's what they understand, and it makes the harassment not as bad, ultimately.”
I love this. It’s scary to give it back but I think it’s a good idea. I’ve sat through too many school board meetings where the liberals keep pushing that we’re neighbors, we’re friends, we have to understand each other. Or there’s the ‘we take the high road’ attitude, which ok, yes, but I feel like it gets us nowhere.
Exactly! Any time I hear someone say "when they go low, we go high," it makes me tear out what little hair I have left. Doubly so if they do it in some sort of sing song-y, condescending way.
We have a racist neighbor (claims he's not) who one day wondered how people of color can possibly afford to live in our neighborhood, rather than the area north of downtown. I had had it with this clown. I schooled him on the history of redlining and systemic racism in housing in Des Moines. If elected officials could regularly tell folks to go F themselves, I'd run for office. LOL
We have a Nazi fanatic that walks up and down the main street of our small mountain town in Colorado with an upside down American flag and a fully-loaded AR-15. Cops won't touch him, town council does nothing (first and second amendment, right?). He and his ilk are threatening to kill the county clerk and election personnel. It does give one pause about getting more involved.
That is fucking scary and there in lies the rub. A lot of these alt-right people are armed to the hilt and have no problem solving whatever argument with their lawyers, Smith and Wesson.
If we've arrived at a point where there's nothing left to do but "give it right back to them because that's what they understand," we're two steps from Ecclesiastes 3:3; the first parts of those two statements. We may well be there and if so, it would do to think about strategy, especially when the other side is eyeball deep in guns and ammo... and just waiting for an excuse to open fire. And especially especially because this will be more like Beirut than the set piece battles between clearly defined geographic borders in the American Civil War.
I don’t think anyone is saying be violent back. That’s a huge extrapolation. But what Amanda is saying is to stop being afraid of the rhetoric and for people to put themselves out there. To not be afraid of backlash or mean comments, but to boldly stand up to it. Rather than the civil war, I’d look to John Fettermans campaign as an example
I fail to see how standing up for oneself and not backing down in the face of harassment is a "hardening of positions." Standing up for oneself and pushing back against harassment with humor and conviction is an incredible and powerful way to push back against the intensity of this political moment. It's a valuable perspective. I think we could all use a little more spine. Me included.
Right-wingers tend to be “defensively aggressive” in how they speak but age and life-success becomes a filter for impulse control. I don’t think a “National divorce” outbreak of violence is ever going to happen. There will always be some sort of non-violent compromise because the alliances are drawn along socioeconomic lines, not political ones. Upper-middle class Republicans still send their kids to elite universities, it doesn’t matter how much they think academia is “ruining the country,” they aren’t actually willing to tie their fates to these beliefs.
This is why it’s much easier for “former conservatives” to handle the verbal backlash from the right because they’re more familiar with the “bark is worse than it’s bite” of the right. That’s why the real issue you’ll face if you go up against them is doxxing and tattletales, it’s not that it’s petty it’s that they don’t have any institutional leverage to flex that would let them get away with actually making good on their threats (unlike the government, etc).
A perfect example of “giving it right back” is when dasha nekrasova (from the redscare podcast) had someone try to intimate her on Twitter by revealing that they knew where she lived (implied threat) and instead of being aggressive back to him she just replied “I dare you to come to my house and kill me.” He never responded.
I hope you're right about the national divorce part. My concern is that so many have lost hope that they feel they've got nothing to lose and that's a recipe for violence. Even if it doesn't devolve into organized war, random violence is just as deadly to the victims and I don't want to have to decide how lucky I feel before going to the grocery store.
This. If you are white and male and aggrieved -- worst combo platter ever -- you walk through this world without consequences already. Political opportunists are revving up the entire populace when they decline to prosecute or even seriously investigate racial/sexual violence. Recruiting must be a snap for these groups, and we see how interconnected the retention process is. The cycle of grievance is never-ending... again, so long as you are white and male.
I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelgänger (which is fantastic), and she also talks about how so many of these extreme right groups will interact and align on many issues even if they’re not in full agreement. The primary example in the book is how Steve Bannon has helped Naomi Wolf (the titular doppelgänger) establish a platform for her own outlandish and dangerous conspiracy theories. Klein says that the Left and Democrats need to be better at that.
It’s so good. She uses the phenomenon of being confused with Naomi Wolf to examine the concept of doppelgänger generally and as a lens to examine how Covid, social media, climate change, etc. have shaped current politics, social life, and discourse.
I was drawn in immediately because I was astonished to learn that she and Naomi Wolf are frequently confused for one another. I’ve read a lot by both of them, and couldn’t see it. But what do I know? I’ve seen people confuse John Henry for John Hancock, so I believe it.
I also had no idea, before reading this book, how Naomi Wolf’s public persona and beliefs had changed since I read her early books back in the 1990s.
I also sometimes confuse Naomi Wolf with Naomi Watts and I have to catch myself before saying something like “The actress from Mulholland Drive said WHAT?”
To Ms Moore's excellent point (among many) regarding involvement in local elections, For The People is a nationwide effort to run lefty candidates for library board elections. You all are plenty smart enough to find out more on your own, but I'm glad to share what I know.
More than one comment about Naomi Klein's new book and the nature of modern political alliances while the national Dems are still means-testing their would-be allies. That party is more concerned with fund-raising than winning elections, and it shows. However you all feel about this, don't sit back and presume Biden or the emerging national consensus on access to reproductive health et al has got this. No party snatches defeat from the jaws of victory quite like the Dems.
Lyz, thank you for so many things. Today, featuring this reporting is vital to the conversation we need to be having with ourselves and our neighbors. MYaM subscriptions are a true bargain and a genuine gift.
This reporting is phenomenal. I read a book about 20 years ago by David Niewert called "In God's Country" about the Patriot and White Nationalist movements in the Pacific Northwest, and then Sarah Palin was on the ticket with all her ties to these groups. They are specifically tied to grievance politics, but it is so much more than that. TurningPoint USA (TPUSA) is making inroads at colleges across the country, including at my little Eastern Oregon school, where the former college president's nephew is involved in the city council, student government, and is also sitting on hiring committees for administrators. I'm deeply concerned. Thanks for sharing this interview.
Well written. Don’t know if I’m a suck it up and fight kind of person. On the other hand my parents were holocaust survivors. My mother is rolling in her grave
Great interview. For a thorough history on the rise of white nationalism in the US, I recommend Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind. Its a dense read but outlines a lot of the strategies still in use today and how they've played the long game for 50 or 60 years to get to this point.
Rural Hoosier here. My county’s Council has been taken over by alt right folks. They are terrible -- and terrible at governing. Now the worst of them wants to run for County Commissioner. We have Democrats challenging, but I’m concerned the straight ticket R voters will prevail.
This country did not arrive at this precarious moment reported by Amanda Moore overnight. And this lurch to authoritarianism did not begin with that 2016 election. To better appreciate Moore's excellent account, read Katherine Stewart's book 'The Power Worshippers' as well as 'Jesus and John Wayne' by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Both books document the long history of what has been a strategic and multifaceted project.
Such a great interview and article. The Nazi party has been active in the U.S since…the start of the nazi party in Germany. Isabel Wilkerson chronicles how the Nazis based their laws on the Jim Crow south. After Jan 6 is there any doubt that the Republican Party is the party of fascism?
I've often been impatient with my progressive friends who throw around the term "Nazi" as an epithet, because it can be pretty glib. At best it's naive, and it's often a rather crude and opportunistic appropriation. I'm an American but I've lived out of the country for many years. For family reasons I spend a fair amount of time in Poland, where the mass murders still resonate. In France, I was very close to a person who did forced labor for the Third Reich. I can see how Americans can find rhetorical Nazi parallels to our current problems but in doing so they risk eliding important distinctions, and degrees of hurt. (Nobody's hurts are to be minimized or rationalized away, that's not my point.) But I think the U.S. awfulness at present is overwhelmingly home-grown, nativist nastiness, with deep roots in our American traditions. It has its specificity, as do the Nazis. Sure, dumbasses like to play with Nazi symbols like a kid putting on a cowboy hat, and it's nauseating and pathetic. And Tucker Carlson and his crew suck up to Orban, which is also pathetic, but to date, Orban is hardly a poster boy for the screamers I know back in my hometown of Knoxville, Iowa. (Also, Orban has his own chameleon-like, Trumpist history--less coherently ideological than narcissistic.) I agree that there's every reason to be concerned about the alt-right, and I'm glad to learn from Amanda Moore. But I'm groping and hoping for more precise language...
I think it's a little ungenerous to read an interview and then wish that the thing that is specific to you was included in there. It's like me reading a recipe for bread and then telling the author, I wished they'd made pizza. I can appreciate that this is your perspective on an issue. But it's not what we were talking about at all, Amanda had a very specific experience and I wanted to talk to her because I thought the conversation would illuminate both how she handles backlash and what she observed in her time with the alt-right. This wasn't a discussion of specific terms, which has happened in other places on the web. And you can look for them there. Also, re: Nazi anyone who has spent any time with the alt-right, knows that they identify with and use the symbols, language, and beliefs of the Third Reich. So, in this instance, it's actually a very useful term.
Sorry--that wasn't my intention but now I see what you mean. More generally, I remain wary of how the term Nazi is quickly trotted out, in so many contexts. I definitely wouldn't want to reduce to ways specific to me, which could be just another example of appropriation, of my doing. As for Amanda's specific experience, I'm sorry if my previous post seemed disrespectful. I apologize.
in her specific experience, I think the term is warranted and the most accurate one given the goals, aims, and ideology of the groups she reported on. I've also reported on extremists in the past several years and talked with groups that combat extremism and all too often they say the problem is that media outlets aren't specific in calling far-right ideology exactly what it is, a new kind of Nazism. And there are a lot of broader points here that are meaningful and being made in this interview that are worth engaging with.
On the topic of the international right wing movement, the rather extreme libertarian party in NZ has been getting support (and $) from the US. They might get enough support to be a coalition partner in the next government.
I was reading about how, historically, a lot of birds got blown by the winds from Australia to NZ and couldn't establish in the different ecosystem, but after people came to NZ and burned down the trees it got easier. Hoping that fascism doesn't manage to establish, but it takes work to fight it too.
Such a great interview and article. The Nazi party has been active in the U.S since…the start of the nazi party in Germany. Isabel Wilkerson chronicles how the Nazis based their laws on the Jim Crow south. After Jan 6 is there any doubt that the Republican Party is the party of fascism?
I read Amanda's piece from a Sunday link of yours and was happy to see your interview with her. It is such important information and perspective!! Thank you.
"Suck it the fuck up and do the right thing." ✊🏽
✊
“You might start to get that backlash. But just give it right back to them because that's what they understand, and it makes the harassment not as bad, ultimately.”
I love this. It’s scary to give it back but I think it’s a good idea. I’ve sat through too many school board meetings where the liberals keep pushing that we’re neighbors, we’re friends, we have to understand each other. Or there’s the ‘we take the high road’ attitude, which ok, yes, but I feel like it gets us nowhere.
Exactly! Any time I hear someone say "when they go low, we go high," it makes me tear out what little hair I have left. Doubly so if they do it in some sort of sing song-y, condescending way.
We have a racist neighbor (claims he's not) who one day wondered how people of color can possibly afford to live in our neighborhood, rather than the area north of downtown. I had had it with this clown. I schooled him on the history of redlining and systemic racism in housing in Des Moines. If elected officials could regularly tell folks to go F themselves, I'd run for office. LOL
We have a Nazi fanatic that walks up and down the main street of our small mountain town in Colorado with an upside down American flag and a fully-loaded AR-15. Cops won't touch him, town council does nothing (first and second amendment, right?). He and his ilk are threatening to kill the county clerk and election personnel. It does give one pause about getting more involved.
That is fucking scary and there in lies the rub. A lot of these alt-right people are armed to the hilt and have no problem solving whatever argument with their lawyers, Smith and Wesson.
If we've arrived at a point where there's nothing left to do but "give it right back to them because that's what they understand," we're two steps from Ecclesiastes 3:3; the first parts of those two statements. We may well be there and if so, it would do to think about strategy, especially when the other side is eyeball deep in guns and ammo... and just waiting for an excuse to open fire. And especially especially because this will be more like Beirut than the set piece battles between clearly defined geographic borders in the American Civil War.
I don’t think anyone is saying be violent back. That’s a huge extrapolation. But what Amanda is saying is to stop being afraid of the rhetoric and for people to put themselves out there. To not be afraid of backlash or mean comments, but to boldly stand up to it. Rather than the civil war, I’d look to John Fettermans campaign as an example
To be clear I am not advocating violence nor is Amanda but the hardening of positions begins a cycle that is extremely hard to unwind.
I fail to see how standing up for oneself and not backing down in the face of harassment is a "hardening of positions." Standing up for oneself and pushing back against harassment with humor and conviction is an incredible and powerful way to push back against the intensity of this political moment. It's a valuable perspective. I think we could all use a little more spine. Me included.
Right-wingers tend to be “defensively aggressive” in how they speak but age and life-success becomes a filter for impulse control. I don’t think a “National divorce” outbreak of violence is ever going to happen. There will always be some sort of non-violent compromise because the alliances are drawn along socioeconomic lines, not political ones. Upper-middle class Republicans still send their kids to elite universities, it doesn’t matter how much they think academia is “ruining the country,” they aren’t actually willing to tie their fates to these beliefs.
This is why it’s much easier for “former conservatives” to handle the verbal backlash from the right because they’re more familiar with the “bark is worse than it’s bite” of the right. That’s why the real issue you’ll face if you go up against them is doxxing and tattletales, it’s not that it’s petty it’s that they don’t have any institutional leverage to flex that would let them get away with actually making good on their threats (unlike the government, etc).
A perfect example of “giving it right back” is when dasha nekrasova (from the redscare podcast) had someone try to intimate her on Twitter by revealing that they knew where she lived (implied threat) and instead of being aggressive back to him she just replied “I dare you to come to my house and kill me.” He never responded.
I hope you're right about the national divorce part. My concern is that so many have lost hope that they feel they've got nothing to lose and that's a recipe for violence. Even if it doesn't devolve into organized war, random violence is just as deadly to the victims and I don't want to have to decide how lucky I feel before going to the grocery store.
I think a lot of people don’t do the right thing out of fear of what ifs, and that’s what Moore is pushing back against
This. If you are white and male and aggrieved -- worst combo platter ever -- you walk through this world without consequences already. Political opportunists are revving up the entire populace when they decline to prosecute or even seriously investigate racial/sexual violence. Recruiting must be a snap for these groups, and we see how interconnected the retention process is. The cycle of grievance is never-ending... again, so long as you are white and male.
I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelgänger (which is fantastic), and she also talks about how so many of these extreme right groups will interact and align on many issues even if they’re not in full agreement. The primary example in the book is how Steve Bannon has helped Naomi Wolf (the titular doppelgänger) establish a platform for her own outlandish and dangerous conspiracy theories. Klein says that the Left and Democrats need to be better at that.
I need to read this book!
It’s so good. She uses the phenomenon of being confused with Naomi Wolf to examine the concept of doppelgänger generally and as a lens to examine how Covid, social media, climate change, etc. have shaped current politics, social life, and discourse.
I was drawn in immediately because I was astonished to learn that she and Naomi Wolf are frequently confused for one another. I’ve read a lot by both of them, and couldn’t see it. But what do I know? I’ve seen people confuse John Henry for John Hancock, so I believe it.
I also had no idea, before reading this book, how Naomi Wolf’s public persona and beliefs had changed since I read her early books back in the 1990s.
I also sometimes confuse Naomi Wolf with Naomi Watts and I have to catch myself before saying something like “The actress from Mulholland Drive said WHAT?”
Every time I see one of the Naomis mentioned I have to recite that little Twitter meme to myself to remember who is who:
If the Naomi be Klein, you’re doing fine
If the Naomi be Wolf, oh buddy ooof
I haven’t seen a fun meme for it but I definitely have to do the same with Parker Posey and Posie Parker
"Suck it the fuck up and do the right thing."
This needs to be a t-shirt.
To Ms Moore's excellent point (among many) regarding involvement in local elections, For The People is a nationwide effort to run lefty candidates for library board elections. You all are plenty smart enough to find out more on your own, but I'm glad to share what I know.
More than one comment about Naomi Klein's new book and the nature of modern political alliances while the national Dems are still means-testing their would-be allies. That party is more concerned with fund-raising than winning elections, and it shows. However you all feel about this, don't sit back and presume Biden or the emerging national consensus on access to reproductive health et al has got this. No party snatches defeat from the jaws of victory quite like the Dems.
Lyz, thank you for so many things. Today, featuring this reporting is vital to the conversation we need to be having with ourselves and our neighbors. MYaM subscriptions are a true bargain and a genuine gift.
Your quote from the Yeats poem has never felt more relevant.
My editor, the brilliant Serena, told me to put it in.
Serena rocks!
This reporting is phenomenal. I read a book about 20 years ago by David Niewert called "In God's Country" about the Patriot and White Nationalist movements in the Pacific Northwest, and then Sarah Palin was on the ticket with all her ties to these groups. They are specifically tied to grievance politics, but it is so much more than that. TurningPoint USA (TPUSA) is making inroads at colleges across the country, including at my little Eastern Oregon school, where the former college president's nephew is involved in the city council, student government, and is also sitting on hiring committees for administrators. I'm deeply concerned. Thanks for sharing this interview.
Well written. Don’t know if I’m a suck it up and fight kind of person. On the other hand my parents were holocaust survivors. My mother is rolling in her grave
Great interview. For a thorough history on the rise of white nationalism in the US, I recommend Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind. Its a dense read but outlines a lot of the strategies still in use today and how they've played the long game for 50 or 60 years to get to this point.
Rural Hoosier here. My county’s Council has been taken over by alt right folks. They are terrible -- and terrible at governing. Now the worst of them wants to run for County Commissioner. We have Democrats challenging, but I’m concerned the straight ticket R voters will prevail.
This country did not arrive at this precarious moment reported by Amanda Moore overnight. And this lurch to authoritarianism did not begin with that 2016 election. To better appreciate Moore's excellent account, read Katherine Stewart's book 'The Power Worshippers' as well as 'Jesus and John Wayne' by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Both books document the long history of what has been a strategic and multifaceted project.
Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is another good book for this syllabus.
Such a great interview and article. The Nazi party has been active in the U.S since…the start of the nazi party in Germany. Isabel Wilkerson chronicles how the Nazis based their laws on the Jim Crow south. After Jan 6 is there any doubt that the Republican Party is the party of fascism?
I've often been impatient with my progressive friends who throw around the term "Nazi" as an epithet, because it can be pretty glib. At best it's naive, and it's often a rather crude and opportunistic appropriation. I'm an American but I've lived out of the country for many years. For family reasons I spend a fair amount of time in Poland, where the mass murders still resonate. In France, I was very close to a person who did forced labor for the Third Reich. I can see how Americans can find rhetorical Nazi parallels to our current problems but in doing so they risk eliding important distinctions, and degrees of hurt. (Nobody's hurts are to be minimized or rationalized away, that's not my point.) But I think the U.S. awfulness at present is overwhelmingly home-grown, nativist nastiness, with deep roots in our American traditions. It has its specificity, as do the Nazis. Sure, dumbasses like to play with Nazi symbols like a kid putting on a cowboy hat, and it's nauseating and pathetic. And Tucker Carlson and his crew suck up to Orban, which is also pathetic, but to date, Orban is hardly a poster boy for the screamers I know back in my hometown of Knoxville, Iowa. (Also, Orban has his own chameleon-like, Trumpist history--less coherently ideological than narcissistic.) I agree that there's every reason to be concerned about the alt-right, and I'm glad to learn from Amanda Moore. But I'm groping and hoping for more precise language...
I think it's a little ungenerous to read an interview and then wish that the thing that is specific to you was included in there. It's like me reading a recipe for bread and then telling the author, I wished they'd made pizza. I can appreciate that this is your perspective on an issue. But it's not what we were talking about at all, Amanda had a very specific experience and I wanted to talk to her because I thought the conversation would illuminate both how she handles backlash and what she observed in her time with the alt-right. This wasn't a discussion of specific terms, which has happened in other places on the web. And you can look for them there. Also, re: Nazi anyone who has spent any time with the alt-right, knows that they identify with and use the symbols, language, and beliefs of the Third Reich. So, in this instance, it's actually a very useful term.
Sorry--that wasn't my intention but now I see what you mean. More generally, I remain wary of how the term Nazi is quickly trotted out, in so many contexts. I definitely wouldn't want to reduce to ways specific to me, which could be just another example of appropriation, of my doing. As for Amanda's specific experience, I'm sorry if my previous post seemed disrespectful. I apologize.
in her specific experience, I think the term is warranted and the most accurate one given the goals, aims, and ideology of the groups she reported on. I've also reported on extremists in the past several years and talked with groups that combat extremism and all too often they say the problem is that media outlets aren't specific in calling far-right ideology exactly what it is, a new kind of Nazism. And there are a lot of broader points here that are meaningful and being made in this interview that are worth engaging with.
Yes, precise language is paramount to shifting perspectives
On the topic of the international right wing movement, the rather extreme libertarian party in NZ has been getting support (and $) from the US. They might get enough support to be a coalition partner in the next government.
I was reading about how, historically, a lot of birds got blown by the winds from Australia to NZ and couldn't establish in the different ecosystem, but after people came to NZ and burned down the trees it got easier. Hoping that fascism doesn't manage to establish, but it takes work to fight it too.
Such a great interview and article. The Nazi party has been active in the U.S since…the start of the nazi party in Germany. Isabel Wilkerson chronicles how the Nazis based their laws on the Jim Crow south. After Jan 6 is there any doubt that the Republican Party is the party of fascism?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden
I read Amanda's piece from a Sunday link of yours and was happy to see your interview with her. It is such important information and perspective!! Thank you.