Hello everyone, it’s me again, your favorite friendly neighborhood debunker.
What a week for the national discourse, huh? We found out that not only do certain vice presidential picks reportedly love to bang furniture, they also are interested in Flipper porn and all kinds of other unwholesome stuff.
UNWHOLESOME!
(Allegedly!)
Most of all, though, the nature of the discourse and what’s piercing through it has really shown everyone what kinds of people are attracted to fascism and authoritarianism: Weirdo creeps.
It doesn’t matter where you look in history. There are no noble reasons to want control over others’ lives and bodies, but there are a whole lot of extremely gross ones. Throughout history, everyone who has sought that sort of power has been deeply weird and creepy. In fact, the only people who are worse than those types are the nasty little bootlickers who run around after them trying to soak up some of their power. They’re the worst ones of all, the creep de la creep.
But don’t just take it from me! Working-class philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote a whole book about the sorts of weird and creepy losers who join mass movements in The True Believer all the way back in 1951!
“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,” he wrote about creepy weirdos, accurately. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.
“This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs.”
Hmmmm. It sure has!
“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life,” he added later, also accurately. “This people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.”
Eric Hoffer could have done some real bangers on social media, don’t you think?
Anyhow, in 2024, this translates to a bunch of deeply uncool types nursing weird grievances trying to use technology to make themselves appear more powerful. Because of the way social media works, the most performative types initially get the most attention, which means they’re noticed by journalists and normalized into our culture.
We live in an unprecedented time, mostly thanks to new mass communications technology. Okay sure it’s been around since the 1980s — and your friendly neighborhood debunker was there, picking up all sorts of disgusting brainworms she should never have been exposed to, but it’s too late to do anything about it now — but it has only truly been as pervasive as it is today for 15 years, tops. We haven’t had time to figure out the best way to deal with new threats yet.
What’s exceptionally new in human history is that this form of new media effectively flattens social structures and allows people to communicate across all kinds of barriers — especially social ones. Now you can go straight to the accounts of public figures you don’t like and tell them to fuck right off, and so can all your friends, and honestly it’s one of the best things about this otherwise god-awful timeline and I’m glad I lived to see it.
To put it another way, any old asshole can have a hand in changing our culture by participating in national and international conversations in text-based or visual ways. And lots of old assholes do! Especially the creeps among us, who saw social media as a chance to normalize their nasty, bigoted shit and bend culture in a way that accommodates them and their creepy desires, because abusers are always on the lookout for ways to do exactly that.
That’s how we got a crop of right-wing pundits and politicians who sound like they’re taking all their best ideas straight from /pol/ or the nastier subreddits, because they have. They discovered that racist, misogynist lies and smears get them press attention, which drowns out legitimate information, intimidates or exhausts vulnerable people into silence, and helps them normalize and recruit more bigots and bigotry-curious types.
But we can fight that without punching down or muddying the waters. As a debunker and specialist in countering propaganda and weaponized disinformation, I’m a big fan of using the truth to fight their bullshit lies. Don’t try to argue with these lies, or any lies, on their merits. Don’t engage in smear campaigns as though they can be counteracted by logic and reason. These people don’t operate on intellectual arguments. Stop treating them like they do!
The only thing that will ever shut these assholes up is being laughed at and mocked. Which is why pointing out how absolutely fucking weird they are, sincerely and honestly, is a great strategy. Look at what a rise it’s getting out of those weirdies!!!
Here’s why this line of attack is so effective as counterdisinformation. It runs on vibes rather than facts, which meets disinformation purveyors on their own turf with their own weapons and doesn’t give anyone details to get bogged down in.
Then it stakes a claim to normalcy, the same one that far-Right fascists crave and can never attain.
Finally, calling them “weird” reminds them that no matter how much violence they bring and death they threaten, no matter how much power they grab up or resources they hoard, nothing can change the fundamental fact that they are simply deeply uncool people.
This is also why they are unable to operate in secrecy and plan a bigger power grab — they need image, attention, and popularity in order to be able to function, but they can’t show what they are all at once, either, because they’re deeply offputting.
That’s why they have bullies, and botnets, and billionaires all going whole hog on spreading their distractions and lies. Their ideas can’t win on their own merits, and not one single person in the far Right has the charisma they need to be persuasive. The best they can do is “entertaining,” and none of them really have that sort of rizz any more either, as the kids say.
At their hearts, these people are playground bullies, the kind that rove in packs looking for smaller and more awkward children to torment. Except they’re adults! They’re all grown up and they’re still bullying children! That’s so weird!
You know what else is weird? How much of their discourse is centered around middle-schoolers’ genitals. In fact, it’s frankly disturbing to hear how much of what they talk about involves having sex with kids.
For example, they want to be able to marry little girls. They make up and spread stories about students pooping in litterboxes in their classrooms. They follow children walking home from school to harass them! They demand to have the legal right to examine the genitals of other peoples’ little kids! That is so fucking weird!
In my day, there used to be consequences for the people who would follow 11-year-olds home screaming about groomers and genitals and pee-peeing in litterboxes, and it wasn’t electing them to the local school board. These people aren’t normal!
And it’s not like having power makes them settle down. Look at what these weirdos do once they have power! They ban books. They go after librarians. They ban free expression. They even want to force surveillance on entire classrooms, so the exact same weirdo perverts who want to “examine” your little kid’s bad-touch area at the swim meet are watching them online all day long!
This is just the very tip (ew) of the grossness iceberg. But really, it’s about time the American people stood up and said, accurately, “Hey, y’all are weird fucking creeps.”
That’s the magic of “weird” discourse, because it neatly shifts the perceived balance of cultural power. The person calling others “weird” implicitly takes ownership of the normal. It doesn’t leave room to argue. In fact, as many of these types of weird creeps are demonstrating in real time right this second, they can’t argue against it. They don’t know how!
That means it slices cleanly through any elaborate insults or smear campaigns and places them in their proper context, as the rantings of incredibly weird creeps who have no business near any sort of influence or power, as it should be, because these schoolyard bullies only understand one language, Cool vs. Not Cool. If you look at the weird incels and boogaloo boys and QAnon and neo-Nazis and white nationalist bootlickers, you can see that all they really want, more than anything, is to feel accepted and cool.
Which they don’t deserve, so keep up the great work accurately describing them as the weirdo creeps that they are!
Because really, these people aren’t just weird. They’re sofa king weird.
So many terrific journalists who need work, and so few moneys. Donate, if you’re holding!
"Here’s why this line of attack is so effective as counterdisinformation. It runs on vibes rather than facts, which meets disinformation purveyors on their own turf with their own weapons and doesn’t give anyone details to get bogged down in.
Then it stakes a claim to normalcy, the same one that far-Right fascists crave and can never attain."
Brilliant analysis! Wish I was still teaching a writing class so I could make this piece required reading!
Let me give you a non-poisonous example of living in a bubble.
After growing up so poor that he had to work alongside his dad from the age of 11, my father became really successful. He was an absolutely lovely person, and generous and kind, and he adored kids, and was basically all that you'd want from a human being.
But he developed a very weird blind spot. Because he'd gotten so successful, everybody he hung around with was, too. They all took great trips and drove nice cars and lived in big beautiful houses and played lots of golf, and ate at expensive restaurants and so forth.
And we were having a discussion once (we were eating dinner with the news on on the television, and the issue came up) about what the median income in America was. At the time I think it was something like $21,000.
My dad could not believe that. He just flatly said that had to be wrong. Because, you know, everyone he knew . . . .
I pointed out that at the business he owned, most of his employees made less than that (this was many years ago, don't come at Dad for being cheap). I said "If you balance all of them against you, the median is going to go way down, because there are so many more of them."
It took FOREVER to get him to grok that. And he was way better at math than I was, and he knew he'd spent most of his working life with people who made very little, at the kinds of jobs you don't want to do, and he knew he'd spent a long time as the business owner making small loans to his employees who couldn't make it to the next paycheck. He knew all of that, but he was in this bubble with his peers that just didn't seem to allow for the fact that there's 1% of Americans doing really, really, really well, and then there's 99% of us who aren't.
My point (and I took long enough to get to it) is that we all have ideas about the world that are shaped much more by our immediate circumstances than what's going on in the actual world. If your circle is made up only of creepy weirdos obsessed with children's genitals, you're going to be shocked to learn that most people think that's horrifying.