A new study from Germany adds more evidence that violent online speech leads to violent attacks in the streets. The Economist:

A paper by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz of the University of Warwick finds a strong association between right-wing, anti-refugee sentiment on German social-media sites and violent crimes against refugees.

For every four anti-refugee posts on Facebook, there was one additional anti-refugee incident. According to the Economist, “This relationship appears to be driven by violent crimes such as arson and assault, and cannot be explained by local social-media usage or demography.”

Correlation is not causation, I know. But we’re well aware of the power of propaganda and its association with violence. So it’s hardly surprising that the same connection is apparent in other forms of hateful speech. For example, if you plot the number of anti-trans articles in the UK press and the number of anti-trans hate crimes reported to the police in the same period, the curves are strikingly similar.

This, by Joshua Foust back in 2019, is very relevant today.

While I do think we still don’t understand the precise mechanism by which someone shifts from believing abhorrent ideas to acting on them, there is copious research demonstrating that abhorrent beliefs do lead to increases in ethnic violence. If a belief system is encouraging of violence and dehumanization then it has to be considered alongside the violent actors who say it inspires them.

Foust begins by writing about Anders Breivik, whose manifesto famously referenced Daily Mail writer Melanie Phillips multiple times, but expands his article more widely:

I think we need to take a few moments to understand how, as the debate over hate speech is manipulated in profoundly bad faith by right wing public intellectuals, the proliferation of hate speech is having a measurably bad effect on us as a society. And, realizing that, I’ll also discuss why placing faith in internet companies to fix the problem absolves everyone else of the need to act… we have to take responsibility for the sort of language we will tolerate, whether online or in more traditional media.

On Friday, 27-year-old Travis Ikeguchi murdered a 66-year-old mother of nine, Lauri Carleton, because he took exception to her shop’s Pride flag. According to US police he tore down the flag and hurled homophobic slurs before killing her in cold blood.

Ikeguchi’s social media is still available to view, and it’s interesting to see how much he has in common with the leading lights of the UK anti-trans movement: he’s clearly a big fan of self-proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh, who JK Rowling recently praised on Twitter, and some of his posts share the same inflammatory rhetoric as the “groomer” posts by everybody’s favourite failed comedy writer. “We need to STOP COMPROMISING on this LGBT dictatorship” is fairly typical.

What’s also clear is that this killer was radicalised online, and that social networks didn’t do anything to stop it. On Twitter, Ikeguchi posted an image of a burning Pride flag with the caption “What do to with the LGBTQP flag?”. The addition of the letter P to denote paedophiles is a right-wing slur like the “groomer” slur, and burning or defaced Pride flags are a trademark of the “anti-woke” and so-called gender critical movements. When @medic_russell reported Ikeguchi’s post as hate speech, Twitter told him that “there were no violations of the Twitter rules in the content you reported”.

That’s not a surprise. Travis Ikeguchi’s anti-Pride rhetoric is not significantly different from the anti-Pride rhetoric espoused by respected members of the so-called gender critical movement, so for example on his Twitter feed he reposted Jordan Peterson, who was sharing a baseless Daily Telegraph article about schoolchildren identifying as cats. Twitter generally doesn’t have a problem with abusive rhetoric around the Pride flag: for example, a tweet implying that trans women are violent men, demanding the removal of the “TQ” from the Pride flag and captioned “GET YOUR SHIT OFF OUR FLAG” apparently didn’t break the rules and was proudly shared by JK Rowling, not previously believed to be a member of the community “OUR FLAG” belongs to.

Similarly when Helen Joyce posed with a pride flag from which the arrows representing trans people and people of colour had been cut out and trodden upon, Twitter didn’t think that was against the rules either. When minor actor turned anti-woke arse Lawrence Fox burned Pride flags in his back garden, flags he called “child mutilation bunting” before adding that “[Pride] isn’t pride. It’s just a celebration of the mutilation of children”, Twitter felt that was just fine. The post is still up.

Violent imagery and violent rhetoric begets violence. And while we don’t have the US gun culture that led in part to Lauri Carleton’s death, we do have the violent homophobia and transphobia that helped radicalise her murderer. And that leads to violence here too. Just last week two men were stabbed outside a London gay bar in what appears to be a hate crime; we’re awaiting the trial of the murderers of teenage trans girl Brianna Ghey, whose death also appears to be a hate crime. In March a gay man was beaten by a gang of youths in Bournemouth because he was holding hands with his husband;  in July a Birmingham estate agent was jailed for a similar attack in which he attacked a gay couple with a glass bottle and a metal pipe.

There’s not a single day that passes where my news feed doesn’t contain stories of hate crimes perpetrated against members of the LGBTQ+ community, usually by straight men, usually because they have convinced themselves – or more likely, been convinced by others – that LGBTQ+ people are evil, perverted and dangerous. The people who push this rhetoric are not typically the ones who act on it. But they have blood on their hands just the same.

Earlier today I wrote a post about the newspapers claiming that trans kids are identifying as cats, horses and the moon, a classic piece of demonisation straight out of the classic text Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

This morning, Elon Musk – whose trans daughter has cut all ties with him, and whose wife apparently left him for a trans woman – claimed that the word cis or cisgender, which is to transgender what heterosexual is to homosexual, is a slur that will get people who use it banned from Twitter. Twitter has no such concerns about actual slurs or threats of violence against trans people or their allies. While Musk was preening to his blue-tick sycophants, I received some Twitter report updates letting me know that actual death threats I’d reported on the service were not in breach of the Twitter rules.

This afternoon, it leaked that the long-delayed UK ban on conversion therapy – aka torture – will have a consent clause, so if you’re coerced or bullied into being tortured then that will remain perfectly legal.

The US evangelical right’s colonisation of our politicians and press is more evident than ever, and their strategies couldn’t be any more obvious.

One of the bigot brigade’s favourite strategies is what far-right goon and Trump strategist Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with shit”: you put out so much misinformation that your enemy simply can’t fight back against it. It takes much more effort to clean up bullshit than to spread it.

Elon Musk knows “cis” isn’t a slur; he doesn’t care, either. He’s doing exactly what Sartre described 1940s anti-semites as doing.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Toni Morrison famously wrote that the purpose of white racism was to wear Black people out.

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

It’s the same with the demonisation of other minorities. Trans people (and the wider communities we’re being used as a wedge to attack) are under constant assault on multiple fronts: in the courts, in the infiltration of school and health boards, in the pages of the press, over the airwaves and on social media. Endless airtime is given to people asking “what is a woman?” and discussing the fever dreams of bigots, a constant discussion about us by people who know nothing about us – and who care even less.

When the moral panic against folk devils like you is stripping trans kids and adults of their healthcare, when people feel emboldened to call you predators and paedophiles simply for existing, when hate crimes are rocketing and you’re more scared of the outside world than ever before, how do you feel anything other than despair?

Writing in Slate, Evan Urquhart says what many of us think: “Just a few years ago, it felt as though the lives of queer Americans were steadily improving… it’s different now.”

It’s a provocative piece, and deliberately so. And it’s very much where my head is too, because while I’m not directly affected by what’s happening in places such as Florida I can see the tide crossing the Atlantic, as it has been doing for the whole time since I came out as me. Interviewee Ryan Campbell puts it very well:

“I try to hold on to the idea that hate burns hot, but it burns out,” Campbell said. “I think things will probably continue to get worse for a bit. This is a thing that will rise and fall, but in the meantime, people are getting hurt now.”

There’s a lot here that resonates strongly with me.

When I was a child, in the late ’80s, I remember first learning that being gay was something bad, and understanding what gay meant well afterward. “Transgender” didn’t exist in my world growing up as that type of human being, but I saw the crude stereotype of a man in a dress as something to laugh at and as something frightening, a predator. As a trans person, my understanding of myself was crippled, distorted by confusion, doubt, shame, and self-hatred. As I came to accept myself, first as a queer woman and then later as transgender, I came to hope that children wouldn’t need to grow up like I had.

…The loss of that promise comes hard. 

The shock for me wasn’t that some people hate us, or that some of the most hateful will incite violence against us and campaign against our rights. No. What shocked me was that nobody cares. We told our peers what was happening. We showed them the bad actors – the religious extremists, the fascists, the grifters – telegraphing their plans like movie villains. We predicted every step of the process, from the reasonable concerns to the refocusing on the wider LGBT+ community and women’s reproductive freedom. And the response was… nothing.

We raised the alarm and nobody came.

Urquhart:

For many in the queer community, we’ve moved well past the point of fearing something might happen, and on to figuring out how we’re going live through this. Our despair is grounded in grim acceptance and practicality. We are learning that life goes on after you accept the fact that no help is coming, and you’ve been left alone to defy or defend or escape, or just bear witness.