Donald Trump's alt-right problem

In last week’s interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump pointedly distanced himself from the alt-right. “I don't want to energize the group, and I disavow the group," he said. Steve Bannon, his chief strategist who many link to the alt-right movement, has no connections to this rogue fringe, according to the President-Elect. According to him, there is no evidence that Bannon is a racist or anti-Semite. If he were to see such evidence, he said, he would be willing to fire him. In addition, he invited reporters to present him with evidence to the contrary.

For Donald Trump, hosting a website that reports news through an alt-right lens is not enough to link Bannon with the movement. Neither is feeding stories that he knows will be devoured by its blievers. On the Media calls this Bannon’s Jekyll and Hyde strategy. On the Hyde side, Bannon uses Breitbart to whip readers into a frenzy. His story choices determine issues and mold narratives that are then parroted by other alt-right sites and if viral enough, receive mainstream media coverage. Bannon channels Jeckyll by using his non-profit, the Government Accountability Institute, to conduct research on his political adversaries. Bannon then takes this packaged – and politically convenient – research and hands it over to mainstream media investigative reporters. The stories achieve legacy media credibility while helping Bannon’s agenda.

But does this make him a racist, bigot, anti-Semite etc…? Like Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro says that there is no evidence that Bannon is. Instead, an alliance with the alt-right is convenient: “I think Steve’s a very, very power-hungry dude who’s willing to use anybody and anything in order to get ahead, and that includes making common cause with the racist, anti-Semitic alt-right.”

Donald Trump recognizes the power of the alt-right and the influence that Bannon has over this community. Even though alt-right leaders don’t consider Trump part of their movement (Richard Spencer for one), his winks and nods to the movement are not un-noticed. Spencer calls Trump the “first step” for their agenda.

Legacy media coverage of the alt-right has focused extensively on Bannon’s connections and implies guilt by association. Ben Shapiro and some guests on BBC’s World Have Your Say note that the alt-right has achieved mainstream recognition purely through heavy media coverage. Shapiro says that they are “mainstreaming” the alt-right and thus helping the group expand its tent; some people now think the alt-right means that you support Trump and disavow Paul Ryan. Hardly.

In this situation, what’s an editor to do? You’re damned if you do (increase exposure for alt-right) and damned if you don’t (you’ll be criticized for missing something important and accused of complicity by not exposing ugly beliefs). To what extent is guilt by association valid? (Read this)

This has parallels to how Americans are dealing with the election. Are Donald Trump supporters racists because they supported someone who made race-based judgments? Is Donald Trump responsible for the opinions and actions of his followers? The more time we spend talking about this brings more attention to these groups. Where’s the proper balance between reporting the news and glorification through media coverage? 

I wish I had an easy answer.

Alt-right 101 and sexual loathing

I can’t get through this campaign season without talking about the alt-right. I heard last week that many people don’t know what the alt-right refers to or means. Anecdotal testing among family and colleagues showed that this was the case; most people understood that it stands for “alternative right,” but were unclear what that means ideologically. Thanksgiving weekend being a time for travel, I had ample time to consume these podcasts in search of some answers: Point of Inquiry,  Trumpcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, On The Media, and the BBC’s World Have Your Say.

What exactly is the alt-right and what does it represent? Like everything else in the media landscape, the definition is slippery and amorphous. In a speech, Hillary Clinton summarized the Wall Street Journal’s definition: “a loose but organized movement, mostly online, that rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker breaks this down further, pointing to four groups of people who are lumped under the term:

1.     White nationalists are the most prominent group. They receive the most media coverage and include figures such as Richard Spencer (the BBC podcast featured an interview with him). The core of their beliefs is to protect white power and white culture in America.

2.     “Pure Trolls.” Marantz uses this term to refer to nihilistic, chaos-causing individuals online. They don’t necessarily have an agenda except to bully and intimidate.

3.     Anti-feminists. Born out of the Gamergate movement, these people ridicule expressions of femininity that do not fit stereotypical notions. Marantz notes a fear of emasculation.

4.     Conspiracy theorists. These individuals promote conspiracy theories that undermine legitimate facts and spread paranoia.

These groups are not natural bedfellows, but fervent support of Donald Trump brought them together as an additional base behind the President-elect. Thus, alternative right literally means the other group of people who have coalesced behind Trump. The idea of the alt-right as separate and different is integral to its identity. For these people, the establishment right is corrupt, clueless and “cucked.” They espouse a different lens through which to view politics and the world.

The alt-right’s fixation on sex and sexual power is striking Followers say that those who do not share their views are “cuckolded” or “cucked” for short; the hashtag #Cuckservative, refers to a traditional conservative. According to Buzzfeed, the use of “cuckold” stems from a genre of submissive porn and “it casts its targets as impotent defenders of white people in America.”  Point of Inquiry notes that “cucked” connotes sexual humiliation, emasculation and castration. This article in the New Republic adds that the term “pushes psycho-sexual hot buttons.” It continues:

Racism and sexism have always been connected, with one of the prime justifications for racial hierarchy being the supposed need to protect white women from black men and also, more implicitly, to keep black women sexually submissive to white men. A cuckservative thus conjures up one of the supreme nightmares of the white supremacist imagination, the fear that white men will assume a submissive role (or position) in the sexual hierarchy.

Along with its discourse, the linguistic imagery of the alt-right is rooted in violence against notions of race, gender, individual agency, and sexual consent. Kevin Drum in Mother Jones refers to this “toxic resentment of women” as powering the alt-right.

All of a sudden, Trump’s comments about Mexican “rapists” take on another level of damaging significance. Was that choice of words a coincidence? I wish I could say yes.

What the media got wrong/Our collective bubble

This post was supposed to be about Donald Trump losing his shit via Twitter (again). Since the election he has shown remarkable restraint and on 60 Minutes sounded almost presidential. This happily fit my post election narrative of a move towards the center; perhaps he really was the pragmatist that Obama predicted.

Yesterday and today the train flew off the rails. Once again Trump is the angry child stamping his foot because he doesn’t get his way. So much for my optimism.

I was telling this to my friend, Liz, and she said, “You know, most Trump supporters don’t care about this at all. This is the insider talk that they rejected on election day.”

She’s right. Election day alarmed me because Donald Trump was elected, but even more so because of what this signified about my reality: I’m an intellectual east-coast dweller who works in higher education.

My bubble was real and I failed to realize it.

The problem is not race or gender, Joan Williams writes in the Harvard Business Journal, but class. Many of the working class grew up in poor families that advanced themselves through discipline, thrift and a good paying job. Seeing the poor receive benefits that they had to work so hard for – or went without – seems unfair. To this group of people, a straight talker who made himself wealthy (this can be argued, but it’s the narrative Trump used) has the traits of a good leader. Democrats failed to appeal to these voters, who saw Hillary Clinton as the epitome of the system that produced this problem. For people who needed a message about economics/jobs, cultural issues such as gender-neutral bathrooms and Black Lives Matter seemed foreign. It was the message of east-coast elites who were clueless about middle America.

In her how-to column about covering Trump post-election, Margaret Sullivan writes that “smugness and willful blindness” were among journalism’s failures. Journalists must “represent the interests of all citizens.”

Independent journalist Chris Arnade spent a year with Trump supporters. He says that “parachute journalism” enabled reporters to come in, confirm what they thought and leave without exploring the deeper issues behind Trump’ support. According to Arnade, these journalists were unable to escape the bubble created by their cultural references. This allowed them to write off Trump supporters while failing to see the larger current of discontent.

One striking thing that Arnade talks about – and Williams also mentions – is dignity. The decline of a way of life, the changes that these Americans face make them feel “frustration, humiliation, and anomie,…feeling like not having a place, drifting”; Trump offered a vision that would restore their dignity.

In light of these insights I re-read a couple pre-election pieces about Trump supporters that I had flagged. In this Ezra Klein piece, the litany of bad things Trump has done can be read like the rant of a disgruntled insider indignant that Trump dares violate the norms and civilities of political discourse. Arnade and Williams would say that this writing does nothing to dissuade a Trump supporter – maybe it even convinces them further how out of touch the media is.

In this article, George Sanders correctly identifies that we are living in “two separate ideological countries.” He also picks up on working class anxieties, “[they] felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious.” But Saunder’s short stint following the candidate caused him to underestimate the pervasive power of these feelings.

For those who supported Donald Trump, his uninhibited Twitter rants and divergence from political norms DON’T. MEAN. ANYTHING. Neither do his outrageous statements nor his past actions. I can talk all I want about how unfit he is for office, but for his supporters, that’s just elite liberal insider talk. Mainstream media failed to understand rural America and thus were shocked when Donald Trump won. We were (are?) in a bubble. Me, my peers, liberals, political insiders, the media, have to recognize this.

It’s the only way to understand what is happening.

Can we stop trying to make Hamilton/Pence happen?

Mike Pence and Hamilton is happening. The social-media-verse vomited and it’s everywhere.  

In a time where every move and meeting is scrutinized and speculated to death by the media – reporters staked out in Trump Tower, anyone? – the Hamilton/Pence incident provided some much needed comedic relief this morning. By far my favorite is:

93% of Americans aren't happy about the Hamilton/Pence booing, mainly because no one shouted "BOO, YOU WHORE!".

— Stats America (@StatsAmerica_) November 19, 2016

It’s also spawned some great hashtags. #NameAPenceMusical will please theater fans (Karen, looking at you) and #boycottHamilton (how do you boycott something that is impossible to get?).

Rob Ford, a professor of Political Science at Manchester University, England, pointed out that Pence/Hamilton is a giant media distraction from the Trump University settlement. Telegraph reporter Asa Bennett also chimed in:

A look at the last 4 hours on Google shows how fast Trump forced his Hamilton spat to the top of the agenda instead of Trump U @robfordmancs pic.twitter.com/0nqZqICvgt

— Asa Bennett (@asabenn) November 19, 2016

Intended to obfuscate Trump’s  breaking his “principle,” it's also a perfect example of the media's inclination to run after the shiniest object in the room. 

If you're a journalist writing abt Trump "Hamilton" tweets in stead of Trump hard rt appts then you've learned nothing from last 18 mths

— (((Rob Ford))) (@robfordmancs) November 19, 2016

For all of the media introspection, gut checks and letters about the importance of investigative work, I don't see the dominant forces driving journalism changing. It's still about advertising dollars (I feel like a broken record here), and people like to read about the latest Tweet storm rather than lengthy investigations into gritty topics. In real life the answer is never "yes" or "no" and always "its complicated." No one likes to read about that. Trump's history in the media and on reality TV make him adept at packaging these meme-stories and handing them over to journalists working on tight deadlines. Trump's tweets are gold for journalists, and a distraction to more important questions about the people he is choosing to run the country. He knows this and he lives this (have I convinced you that he's a media genius yet?). Any tweet creates a flurry of stories and speculation about what he will do next.

President Barack Obama did not manage his own Twitter account. Will Trump relinquish control to his treasured @realDonaldTrump account? I doubt it because he knows its power and influence.

"Bullshit is highly engaging"

These words written by a former Facebook designer aptly describe the problem that the company faces. Dissatisfied with the Facebook’s response to allegations that fake news on the site may have influenced the election, employees have formed an unofficial task force to air their grievances. They claim that Facebook knew what was happening and had the tools to take corrective action but didn’t. The platform has effective standards tools – as seen in the removal of breast cancer videos or the image of the napalm girl – but leadership was unwilling to use these methods to eliminate fake news.

Meanwhile, in response to similar criticism in how it prioritizes fake news, Google will no longer allow such sites to use its advertising platform – no word on whether it will tinker with search algorithms. Facebook quickly followed once someone broke the ice.

Regulating news sounds nice but aren’t we ignoring the elephant in the room? Clicks/views = advertising dollars. These are for-profit companies and money reigns supreme. 

“Bullshit is highly engaging.” It sure is. And, it makes money. Facebook and Google aren’t journalistic entities and don’t have a responsibility to report the truth. Making efforts to do it are nice and make everyone feel good. I’m not convinced it’s feasible. Judgements about news are so arbitrary (note, neither site has said how it will judge “fake” from “news”) and profit incentives are too strong. 

The platforms’ monopolies over their respective niches insulate them from popular pushback. We can complain all we want, but we’re still going to use Facebook and Google. These tech giants have incredible influence over the things people see and (in terms of Facebook) the way people feel. Hopefully, CEOs will wield this power benevolently. Ultimately, we’re responsible for our own truth.  

We need to talk about Facebook (again)

Did Facebook cause influence the outcome of the election? Was Donald Trump elected because of Facebook?

These questions have been the subject of a bunch of articles over the past couple of days. Basically, Facebook is “embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced” the outcome of the election.

Early this morning, Mark Zuckerberg posted this open letter denying Facebook’s influence and renewing a commitment to preventing fake news and hoaxes. The problem, and he recognizes this, is that declaring stories accurate and false turns the platform into an arbiter of truth.

That pesky question about the nature of truth once again rears its ugly head. It is one of the most essential issues raised this cycle, made ever more complicated because of its connection to partisanship and identity.

This NYMag piece claims that “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook.” In essence, Facebook (and other social media) enabled Trump to communicate directly with supporters thus bypassing the mediating and filtering effect of the mainstream press. In other words, Facebook doesn’t just intensify politics – by providing another way to get news; it “changes politics entirely” by altering the power dynamic of candidate – media – consumer.

According to Read (author of NYMag piece), Trump exists because he was able to get his message directly to supporters. And, (interestingly), so does Obama: a candidate with virtually no experience but a powerful message of hope galvanized large amounts of people through online organizing. Political insiders/media establishment/east coast elite/liberal snobs (whatever you want to call them) often decry social media’s degrading of political discourse, but does this apply if it also gave us Barack Obama?

On tonight’s 60 Minutes, Trump credited his social media presence as leading to victory. He said that it offered him a way to fight against unflattering stories.  For Trump, “social media has more power than the money” spent by his opponents.

Trump gets it: social media allows the creation of self-reinforcing communities. These groups of people would never find each other without the communication power of the internet and their feelings cannot be legitimized without direct access to a candidate. Trump knows how to use these communities to build power, a practice that many find detrimental to civility in politics. Is it Facebook’s job to censure communities that have gone too far down the rabbit hole? Isn’t that how we ended up here in the first place?

Covering post-election Trump

Over the past few days, the media has struggled to figure out how to cover Donald Trump. He is the antithesis of a traditional candidate and rallied crowds by bashing America’s unofficial fourth branch. There is a delicate balance to be struck between excoriating the president elect – because it is so easy – and showing respect for the man who just achieved the greatest feat in American politics. There are deep divisions in this country, revealed by this election, and I can’t help but wonder whether the media has a responsibility to mend those wounds? Yesterday, I looked at the home pages of legacy media: ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Nearly every front-page story was about one of four things:

• Emotion (shock, fear, elation and protests)
• Unification (coverage of the speeches by Trump, Clinton and Obama and statements from other pols about working together)
• Analysis (election data, what happened?, why did the polls fail to predict the outcome?
• The future (policy changes, administration picks, legislative priorities, first 100 days)

The outlier, ABC News, prioritized pettiness and shock value with this story front and center, “President Obama’s Long History of Insulting Donald Trump.” Today’s lead story also goes for click-value, “The Moment Donald Trump, Family Knew He Won the Election” as opposed to the more gritty story that led every other homepage: Mike Pence leading the transition. 

Now that I’m in this class I have a heightened appreciation of the ways media narratives affect absorption of a story. I’m also much quicker to criticize when I feel like integrity is being compromised for the sake of a sensational story. After all, as we read in this piece, sensationalism=eyeballs/clicks=advertising dollars; it’s not a complicated connection.

There have been plenty of reactions from on both sides after the election. I understand that there’s a journalistic duty to report what’s happening, but I also feel like there is a journalistic duty to moderate the rhetoric and refrain from stoking already fiery emotions. Check out the following headlines that report the same thing – in drastically different tones:

Christie, Newly Demoted From Trump Transition Team, Faces Calls For His Impeachment (National Journal) vs. Pence to Take Over Christie’s Role Leading Trump Transition (New York Times)

Meet the potential Trump cabinet picks most likely to make liberals squirm (WaPo) vs. Trump Team Reviewing High-Level Cabinet Appointments (NBC News) 

There’s a lot of anxiety right now – CNN reported coping mechanisms this morning and WaPo noted that suicide hotline utilization is up. Whether these emotions are warranted is not the point. The point is that it’s there. There are ways of reporting the news that don’t promote anxiety and suspicion, ways that may help people to mend the rifts so brutally torn. Headlines might not be as jazzy, but it’s worth it for the sake of peace. That’s journalistic integrity.

ICYMI

There's a new website for the Trump transition: 

GreatAgain.gov

The day after

On Facebook Live last night, I said that the media narrative, once a victor was declared, would be telling in how the public interprets the election. Today's overarching media narrative is best summed up in this one tweet:

The truth is none of us know as much as we publicly purport to.

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) November 9, 2016

The search for "what happened" has taken on a couple of dimensions. The first is the media's own recognition that it grossly underestimated large portions of the population and thus failed to predict the outcome. In a WaPo piece, Margaret Sullivan wrote:

To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it.

A GOP insider quoted in Politico also blamed the establishment, "Even in the face of polls that showed it very close, [the press and DC insiders] said that Trump had almost no chance. It was because they couldn’t imagine it happening."

This article in Politico refutes Sullivan's claim by pointing the finger of blame on American voters:

He slung praise upon a constituency that was starved for the respect of a plain-speaking candidate, and they rolled over on their backs and grinned, tongues akimbo, as he scratched their bellies.

The media is also looking at the pollsters. In the Guardian, Mona Chalabi, points out that social science polling is not hard science and interpretation introduces bias. Americans are partly to blame for our faith in surveys. Instead of recognizing unpredictability, "you’d rather hit refresh on a little web page that tells you how America will vote. Too bad the numbers were wrong."


The final dimension goes deeper than the topical "missing the story" and speaks to the established paradigm that underlies assumptions about politics. These suppositions, faith in numbers and data, dependence on the wisdom of the political establishment, failure to recognize the entrenched anger of rural America, the discounting of Trump supporters as an angry uneducated minority, an unfailing faith in minority turnout for Clinton, and an underestimation of the GOP turnout machine produced a general consensus that Clinton would win. For the media, insiders, and many of us, this paradigm was shifted early this morning. Donald Trump harnessed an energy that many chose to ignore and  was successful.

This leaves me questioning my own assumptions about Americans. In the Nation, Joan Walsh writes, "At this moment, it feels like everything we know about politics is wrong." That's how I feel and it's a little disorienting.

the 4pm update

I’m getting news updates about the state of the race from Politico’s Live Blog. It’s got great content from the ground all over the country. For local, I have been using the Courant’s Live Updates. It’s less substantive but I’m enjoying the anecdotes. I also have my eye on CapitolReport but it’s main headline hasn’t changed in over six hours.

This Politico story about what to watch out for today will definitely inform my later viewing. The website has another countdown timer *gasp* which counts down the hours until the first polls close.

I’ve been checking out Slate’s live projections. There were some technical snafus this morning so the charts didn’t look interesting until about 10am. Now some of them are down again. It’s interesting to look at but at this point feels really abstract. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the live polling data boosted stocks this morning.

There have been reports of long lines, confusion and intimidation across the country and in CT.  This long-running story/blog by the New Haven independent comes complete with a hero-cop who "waded into an East Rock polling spot Tuesday afternoon to the sound of applause — because he had boxes of ballots with him so that waiting citizens could finally vote."

We’ve seen higher than expected turnout across the country and in the state. Google data masterminds say that this year could be record-setting and Pennsylvania officials expect 80%. 

Fox News wins with this headline: Campaigns aim for turnout as voters deliver decision in Trump-Clinton brawl

I have been trolling social media too. On days like today, I really love it. I love seeing my friend’s kids with “I voted” stickers, and discovering that the guy who lived across the hall in college is in fact a closeted Democrat. It cheers me to see how many people are engaged in the act of voting, and wearing pantsuits and protesting and doing all of the other crazy stuff that makes us who we are. It also, (at least for the moment) gives me optimism about the American voter. 

P.S. I’m sad that absentee voters don’t get stickers. I’m a social media pariah without my selfie.