"... [I]f we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." - Philosopher Karl Popper
FOMO ON HISTORY • FOMO ON EXTREMISM • FOMO ON CULTURE
Still from Jordan Klepper Finger’s The Midterms: America Unfollows Democracy
I once mocked the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. I mean, how many commitments to sobriety, working out — or daily journaling — come to fruition? Yet, once I became an editor in cognitive science and learned about behavior, I had a small epiphany: If you have an opportunity to drop a bad habit or cultivate a positive one — and it’s helpful to sync it with the Gregorian calendar — go for it! (Footnote: Charles Duhigg is an avatar on the subject. I highly recommend his The Power of Habit).
Seeing with both eyes open into 2023 — and with gratitude because having two working eyes was not a given — in this week’s FOMO I want to share some takeaways: What I learned over the last year and how it sets a path for the future.
I say this because as I write this today — New Year’s Day — pundits discuss the outbreak of violence with the future tense and use IF, THEN statements. Hate speech — its codification as policy, legislation, as well as the decisions of an illegitimate SCOTUS — has already led to not just a “feeling” of unsafety, but assault.
This year, I aspire to share what is happening and is underreported, or, worse, willfully miscontrued. I’m game to amplify examples where our neighbors, organizers, and activists are fighting back.
•Often, what is most needed is visibility: Recognition that an incident is not a one-off, but part of a pattern.
•There must also be an ongoing commitment to debunk false premises which can frequently pass as conventional wisdom (See: public safety; homelessness.)
•Finally, in an era of “context collapse” — assumptions and arguments need grounding. Today’s primary sources demand vigilance. It’s never been easier to distort a fact.
Last month, thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intrepid journalists, I caught wind in real-time that the New York Young Republicans Club (NYYRC) soiree on tony Park Avenue was WILD. That invited guests included a raft of White Nationalists and that NYYRC’s president Gavin Wax said — not in jest:
“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”
In addition to inviting newly minted Congressman George Santos (TBD), NYYRC also invited Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who gave a speech which landed on the ear as a threat for the next January 6th to REALLY have a body count. We expect this shtick from her, but not at a NYC gathering. That said, again, I was unsurprised. Earlier this year Wax had tweeted his disbelief that Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro could have possibly lost - shades of “Stop The Steal.” And he expressed some sort of amorphus interest in helping Bolsonaro return to power. Huh? (One outlet, the Washington Post even reported how Bolsonaro’s son, and members of Trumpworld (Miller, Bannon) had made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago since his loss. I wondered why this wasn’t a bigger story?)
A recent episode of the daily It Can Happen Here podcast made it clear that extremism wasn’t happening just on Park Avenue. It is happening throughout NYC. The episode told the tale of five recent anti-LGBTQ incidents across New York City. There were rallies in Staten Island, Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, and branch libraries including the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, which I’ve been known to frequent. For the latter, neurodivergent youth were being treated to Drag Story Hour, only to experience chaos and hate. In the past few weeks, not only was the Heiskell branch subject to a second rally - but City Counciler Erik Bottner saw his office vandalized and a neighbor in his building assaulted by these protestors.
But.
Last week, the Jackson Heights Public Library faced down a similar action. This time the community was out in full force — with straight allies, and folks crossing bridges from the other four boroughs. Four HUNDRED counter-protestors came out to defend a literacy program which has been deliberately defamed. They outnumbered a coalition of the ignorant (including the Proud Boys) 4:1.
Here’s a still from the day, featuring a Dancing Unicorn who was pure joy — and probably lowered the temperature.
Still from video shot by @ScooterCasterNY (Oliya Scooterscaster)
Let the Unicorn Be A Lesson
To leaven the bitterness of these difficult times, I’ve been searching out comedy which doesn’t ignore the moment, but engages with it with more agility that I usually see with “legit” journalists. Well, to be honest, I didn’t consciously seek it out - but after I found one example, I tracked down more.
I was obsessed with the stories conspiracists told themselves, and why.
How did we go from “OK, Boomer” to “You’re a Groomer”?
I watched the Alex Jones proceedings in a way I never gave tabloid cases like the Mendendez Brothers murder trial the time of day. And I learned that Jones was a global phenomenon.
In the October 25th edition of FOMO I referenced Shadowland, a six-part docuseries on several Americans who not only swallowed “Stop the Steal” whole, but participated in January 6th. I later came upon what I’m now thinking of as an essential text — er, a podcast — heading into the 118th Congress: Jordan Klepper Fingers The Conspiracy. Each episode tangles with tropes and memes which many of us laugh at — but will soon be the subject of hearings in the majority Republican House. Klepper showed me an example - which fortunately was not sui generis - of a communicator seeking to authentically connect with their subject. And, if armed with facts which might pierce the bubble some are inhabiting, so much the better. Klepper takes on the sort of subject matter which Mike Lindell took directly to the Oval. Beginning with Hunter Biden’s Laptop; the Italian satellites Sidney Powell believes cost the Donald the election; and QAnon’s embrace of… JFK, Jr. Let me be clear, I had no effing clue how byzantine these holdings were. And, how fragile there could be when dragged into daylight. I would advise staffers for Jamie Raskin’s able staffers to listen to the entire season.
Somehow, Fingers led me to cross the pond, after gleaning that there was a UK counterpart to Alex Jones. In this case, Richard D. Hall was obsessed in proving that the 7/7 Manchester Bombing was faked. While he doesn’t have the notoreity of Jones, Hall’s videos have been seen over 16 million times. (The population of the UK is only 67million.) I discovered BBC Radio 4’s Disaster Trolls, hosted by Marianna Spring, its disinformation beat reporter. While Spring did not display Klepper’s sense of the absurb, she was just as patient, and interested in converting the delusional, one person at a time. The final episode of the series was punctuated by echoes of the $1B+ finding in the States against Alex Jones, sparking the Manchester Bombing survivors — who have been stalked and defamed by Hall for over five years -- to bring a similar case against him.
Sometimes, when you set an intention to changing how you see things, your aperture widens and adjacent opportunities present themselves. I so admired what both Klepper and Spring had done. Not only reporting on disinformation, but in some cases moving their subjects to consider facts which undermine their assumptions. I soon learned that my dear friend Matthew Charles Davis (aka “The Comms Whisperer”) was doing a LinkedIn Live, “Countering Extremism With Kindness.” Months early, I would have passed, given the crunchy headline. Knowing Matt suffers no fools, I signed up. I met Hadiya Masieh, the founder of the Groundswell Project UK.
Given the growing anti-Semitism, aforementioned homophobia, and general rising hate towards all “Others,” I was fascinated by her mission and engagement. Masieh was once a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical political — albeit nonviolent — group whose goal is an Islamic caliphate. She pivoted after the London Train Bombing in 2005, and now speaks out against extremism of all kinds. Groundswell works with those who are both ready to question their conspiracy-minded beliefs, and those who have left their extremist past and can speak first-person to having held these assumptions. Here’s the session. (Worry not, it’s only a half-hour long). Here also is a three-minute video with Ivan Humble, a former Islamophobe who has become an anti-racism campaigner. I was especially taken with Hadiya’s “Kindness Mapper” — which appears to be like a mutual aid network, except the need is for empathy and community to help folks leave radicalized networks - which are often their only family.
Just as I found Jordan Klepper’s Fingering to be… essential, I want to recommend a number of basic podcasts which either speak to aspects of living in this disinformation age (remember when we christened modernity as The Information Age?)
Rather than ask you to listen to entire seasons (Kleppers and Spring’s both GALLOP) allow me to highlight episodes with special resonance:
•The News Literacy Project has a podcast called, “Is That A Fact?” And it does not suck. Given the 10th anniversary of Sandy Hook last month - and the Alex Jones accountability - this two-parter really covered not only the event, but how Jones monetized disinformation, and by the reckoning of host Elizabeth Williamson (herself the author of Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth) Sandy Hook serves as a template for disinformation to this day.
•It’s very easy - and lazy - to say that MSNBC is the Fox News of the Left, but that erases some fine journalism, especially its podcasts. While I wrote about Rachel Maddow’s Ultra in November, (soon to be a Spielberg Joint) I had a sense that her colleague Steve Kornacki’s podcast, The Revolution, would likewise be top-notch. The Revolution is timely, a skeleton key to understand today’s Republican Party by understanding its past. With archived and contemporary interviews, it looks back at the rise of Newt Gingrich and his successful quest to flip control of the House from the Democrats for the first time in forty years. Under those circumstances -- one party owning the lower House for two generations — it’s tempting to consider him the underdog. The feeling passes, however, as we learn Gingrich’s tactics, which I can only describe as Machiavelli meets Sun Tzu. I’m not at only surprised, then, to learn that he was very much involved in Trump’s failed coup; both share an addiction for relevance and revenge. After refusing to participate in the six-episode podcast series, Gingrich reached out to Kornacki and wanted the last word. The final episode then is his perspective on what went down. Kornacki corrects the facts as needed, and the conversation is a throughline between 1994 and today. Just as Klepper briefed me on the craziest of theories, I now have the generational backstory of the G.O.P. While I recommend the entire series, the Newt conversation alone is rich enough to reboot one’s thinking.
If The Revolution explained the success of the Republican Party top-down, how to account for a generation of citizens frequently voting against their own best interests? Fortunately, On The Media, my favorite media criticism show — across any media — had just released The Divided Dial. Ostensibly the story of Talk Radio, and why it is dominated by the Right. And for those not tracking it — which I was not — how something called Salem has become something akin to the love child of Clear Channel radio meets Sinclair. The latter being the owner of 185 channels in 85 markets. If you’re unfamiliar with Sinclair, these are not your father’s local television stations. Sinclair mandates must-run copy — frequently coordinated with the RNC — and those who refuse have been fired. Just as Kornacki managed to get the subject of his podcast for a final episode, host (and Fulbright!) Katie Thornton interviewed Salem’s Senior Vice President Phil Boyce - known for discovering Sean Hannity at WABC-New York. Folks, he’s a true believer. And, quietly, an election denier.
If you engage with any of these podcasts, I have a feeling that they’ll leave you wanting more. To be sure, it can be traumatizing to learn that there’s something of a Mirror World out there.
The assignment, then, is to take the perspective of those who don’t share our beliefs, and go forward. Can we possibly work together with some? And where that’s unlikely, how do we communicate our message and appeal to the many folks who aren’t engaged either way on a daily basis?
PART II.
One key way, which is frequently misunderstood is Culture:
I maintain that there is no “culture war.” We won. What we have seen and now see are contrived moral panics (rainbow Fentanyl, furries on school campuses) which echo back to the Eighties (thank you, Stranger Things). Hell, such panics can be traced back to the Salem Witch Trials.
As America’s population has become more diverse (despite the 400 times that Tucker Carlson has discoursed on “Great Replacement Theory'“) and various civil rights movements have enabled women, people of color, folks with disabilities, and LGBTQ folks to move from invisibility to supporting characters, to the leads in our own stories — there is a Go-For-The-Rapture backlash.
Since the protests which were sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of law enforcement, there has been reflection not only about the need for diversity (which can smack of lip service or tokenism) but confronting systems of power, and needing to spotlight stories based on a fraught past - which we were frequently spared. This accounts for the bullshit of Christopher Rufo’s campaign against teaching civil rights in schools — by removing the context and focus of Derrick Bell’s formulation of “critical race theory.”
Theater — a favored art form of mine - is not as didactic as reading either side of this ledger. After being closed for the first year of Covid, Broadway returned with theaters having hired Artistic Directors and Board members who weren’t almost exclusively white and abled. And from this, they supported two seasons of art which had never made its way onto the Great White Way, not to mention the adjacent Metropolitan Opera. This season alone, I saw themes and experiences which had never been on a Broadway stage, most prominently A Strange Loop (centering a queer, large, Black man) — which deservedly won a Tony for Best Musical. Not every play reached its level of excellence, but that wasn’t the point.
Between Citizen Wong, The Far Country, and Golden Shield — all plays about being Chinese-American - I was stunned to learn about the consequences of the Chinese Exclusionary Acts, and about the ironically named Angel Island near San Francisco, where Chinese nationals hoping to gain American citizenship could be detained in what were basically jails, for more than a year.
I was enthralled by Paradise Square, which explored a moment in pre-Civil War NYC where Black and Irish cultures intertwined. Despite the tragic denouement of Five Points being burnt down to the beams, I still processed it as a artifact of hope.
By my reckoning I caught well more than a dozen play by AAPI folks, Latine playwrights and directors, and Black creators (both Charles Blow and Lynn Nottage adapted their works, a memoir and play, respectively, for opera). I enjoy opera as much as hair-band heavy metal, but these I loved. They weren’t abstruse objects of art - concerning fatalistic blue-bloods. Instead, both mined uniquely American stories which had been deliberately kept offstage and offscreen.
Nothing, however, prepared me for Corisicana, which centered a character with Down’s Syndrome and starred the superb Jamie Brewer, who herself has Down’s. As the brother of a sibling who lived with cognitive delay, the experience was revelatory, and I am crying as I write this just thinking about it.
My point? We need to go outside our comfort zones. Not merely to be allies - which is currently a practical necessity - but for shared compassion. Two years ago, a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s birthday, I wrote about how I was gifted with a set of Golden Legacy comics (the term “graphic novel” had yet to be invented). Despite receiving a first-rate education, discussion of African-American history amounted to all of perhaps two days of classroom time in middle school.
The full set was comprised of 16 volumes, each 32 illustrated pages, introducing me to such titans as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Crispus Attacks, and yes, Martin Luther King. I shared them with my teachers and demanded to know why we hadn’t been taught this curriculum. For many of us now well into our adulthood, our engagement is through culture. How many of us first heard about the Tulsa Race Riots by seeing it on HBO’s Watchman?
A cautionary note, which is very much a piece of the backlash/whitelash we’re experiencing: Many of the plays and musicals I saw did not play to packed houses. Even A Strange Loop is closing prematurely, in a handful of weeks. I attended Ain’t No Mo’ on what was to be its last weekend. Playwright Jordan E. Cooper made a stirring plea that night for ongoing support and managed to get Hollywood heavyweights including Tyler Perry, Shonda Rhimes, Gabrielle Union & Dwyane Wade, Queen Latifah, Jada and Will Smith, and Sara Ramirez to buy out the house. But that only gave the show an additional week.
I fear that the legacy members of Boards and financially-strapped Artistic Directors who were hired in 2019 and 2020 will retreat from offering work which is in more than one way transformative. We need to connect with an understanding that such work is meaningful to moving the work of a pluralistic, egalitarian society forward — despite frequent attempts at gaming social media to make such work seem contrived, or mediocre.
In the same way that I heard “Belonging” become a watchword in hiring for corporate America (non-profit America, too) — audiences also need to feel invited. They are rightly skeptical when you are presenting a production that for the first time acknowledges their existence after having ignored, exploited, appropriated, or just plain gotten it wrong. Let’s not even begin to discuss the economic issues behind a $100+ theater ticket.
Since I’m running long I want to briefly point to things you can do with your wallet at this time:
•UnFox My Cable Box. Media Matters For America’s campaign is very focused: Fox doesn’t need advertisers because its business model doesn’t rely upon it. Over the years it has negotiated a fee which amounts to $2 per customer along with its “must carry” carriage status. For background, this amounts to up to SIX TIMES what a CNN or MSNBC charge per customer. The call to action is simple: Call your cabler and tell them that you don’t want to pay for Fox News. Streaming made a la carte a thing (I no longer have cable because of it) but we need to unbundle Fox for them to be subject to the marketplace of ideas.
•Ad Networks. Have you noticed that your favorite publications sometimes serve you an ad for something odd like Rudy Guiliani’s opus on “Leadership”? CheckMyAds has done incredible work on pressuring mainstream outlets — from publishers to TV networks to online publications — to break with advertisers who traffic in hate and bigotry. If you see something, say something. (Not everything is 100% successful. Shopify continues to support LibsofTikTok, which is a delivery system of domestic terrorism towards LGBTQ folks. But don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.)
Preview: In my next newsletter I’m going to focus on Civic Engagement of Youth. Those who have been supporting it for years. And those who are cultivating the emerging generation — and centering People of Color in its training of civic leaders.
I want to sign off by acknowledging the passing of Terry Hall, the frontman of The Specials, a favorite Ska band. Credit to their song, Racist Friend, for giving me clarity where bigotry is concerned:
Racist Friend
If you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to endBe it your sister
Be it your brother
Be it your cousin or your, uncle or your loverIf you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to endBe it your best friend
Or any other
Is it your husband or your father or your mother?Tell them to change their views
Or change their friends
Now is the time, now is the time, for your friendship to endSo if you know a racist who thinks he is your friend
Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to endCall yourself my friend?
Now is the time to make up your mind, don't try to pretendBe it your sister
Be it your brother
Be it your cousin or your uncle or your loverSo if you are a racist
Our friendship has got to end
And if your friends are racists don't pretend to be my friendSo if you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time for our friendship to end
If you want to rock out, here’s the video.
I remain the same congential optimist I have always been - believing that the default of human nature is kindness, not cruelty. BUT, that said, too many people have been, I daresay, “groomed” by the Far Right to process greater inclusion and equality as zero sum and have been told that grievance is a natural response. It isn’t - it’s learned.