Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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We’re all doomed

  • “God. Damn. YouTube.”

    If you don’t want to make yourself thoroughly miserable about the state of the world, don’t read the Reddit group r/QAnonCasualties. It’s a forum for people who’ve lost or are losing friends and family to conspiracy theories.

    Mum, stepdad and brother have been well down the rabbit hole since about 2013-2014.

    Started with flat earth, now I’ve heard almost all conspiracies you could imagine. Doctors are bad and all drugs are bad, vaccines cause all health problems, billionaires eating babies, flouride, 5g. It all started because YouTube. God. Damn. YouTube.

    Another:

    Since we’ve been in lockdown [my two best friends have] become consumed by Plandemic misinformation, anti-mask and COVID denial stuff, and my friend admitted to me the other day that she supports Trump because “he’s the only one doing anything about the child trafficking.” She’s gotten a medical exemption from wearing a mask because she thinks the virus is a lie.

    I haven’t mentioned this, but I won’t trust her around my newborn since she’s not being safe with the virus, and I also have a condition that puts me in the highly risk category.

    In many cases the slide into conspiracy theories began with trauma.

    [My boyfriend’s mother] really started to subscribe to conspiracy theories over 20 years ago, when her other son (BF’s little brother) was diagnosed with severe autism. That son died last year, just before his 25th birthday, after suffering from seizures his whole life. She blames vaccines for all of it.

    Unsurprisingly, she is very suspicious of COVID-19 and masks, has already stated she will never take a COVID vaccine, doesn’t understand BLM or the protests, etc… and yesterday at dinner, she asked us if we knew about “pizzagate”. I braced myself. She claimed that some of BF’s cousins opened her eyes to this theory and she’s starting to believe it.

    This one’s from the UK, a woman writing about her boyfriend:

    His Grandad has just passed away and I think he was in a vulnerable place making him more susceptible to all this. He was researching more and more, joining more and more groups on Reddit/Facebook, watching countless videos and basically just spending hours and hours getting deeper ‘down the rabbit hole’

    …I feel like I’ve lost my boyfriend. He’s normally so level headed and sound minded and normally so smart and switched on but now he’s been brainwashed by these people

    It’s a terrible litany of destroyed friendships, families and relationships, made all the sadder by the knowledge that the people who’ve been sucked in by this bullshit believe that they’re the rational ones.

    This is absolutely breaking my head, because at this point any sort of rational discussion hits an immense brick wall. How can you argue with someone who always says that all your souces are “fake news”, and all her sources are correct?

    It’s also very clear that these conspiracies are spreading far beyond their usual audience.

  • Your neighbours are going mad

    One of my friends has been watching with horror as a former school friend has plummeted down the rabbit hole of online radicalisation. The former friend is a university educated middle class woman; think stereotypical Waitrose shopper.

    Six months ago, the friend started posting on Facebook about her doubts over the official COVID death tolls.

    Three months later:

    She has gone from questioning official death tolls to hollering about 5G to spreading QAnon conspiracies on Facebook: “I’ve done my research!”

    And now we’re at the six months mark:

    This weekend she was out at the QAnon protests with her husband and kids. Maskless, no social distancing. Wearing a T-shirt that said “NO TO: pedophiles, Bill Gates, Covid Lies, Plandemic, MSM”…. out on the street giving speeches about Pizzagate and how it’s linked to the ‘fake virus’ through a megaphone.

    As my friend pointed out, note the American spelling of “paedophile”. QAnon is a US conspiracy movement that’s being imported wholesale, American spellings and all.

    If you’re not familiar with QAnon, it’s a far-right conspiracy theory endorsed by clueless celebrities, Donald Trump and other Republican politicians and, increasingly, the people next door. It’s grown significantly during lockdown and social networks have been too slow to crack down on it.

    The BBC puts it very well.

    At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

    Let’s just read that again.

    President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

    It’s a kind of meta-conspiracy theory that happily pulls in other conspiracy theories – 5G phone masts spreading coronavirus, Bill Gates supposedly putting microchips in Coronavirus vaccines, Hilary Clinton carrying out child sacrifices – and makes them its own. Remember the recent claims that the online furniture shop Wayfair was trafficking stolen children? QAnon.

    The FBI considers “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” a growing threat:

    The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.

    The Guardian featured a piece about US women who are falling for and amplifying these conspiracy theories.

    This is not solely a fringe group of uninformed people blindly forwarding cat videos. These are college-educated women who (correctly or incorrectly) believe they have done their research. They look out for their families, the health of their children, and they share information on their Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Adherent literature abounds, providing a rabbit hole of media links to seemingly real evidence from experts.

    There are obvious parallels with UK anti-trans activism, which I’ve seen described as “QAnon for British women”: it too rejects science and facts because “I’ve done my research.”

    “From Rockefeller to Gates, it’s all related,” Alice told me. “This has been in the works for a long time, and it’s all part of a new world order of control and surveillance.” She attends Zoom meetings with doctors who explain the “misuse of ventilators in NYC hospitals” and how “wearing a mask will kill you”. She felt privy to a labyrinth of interconnected world-altering plots. My questioning the credibility of these sources was taken as a sure sign that I had been brainwashed by the mainstream media.

    My friend:

    The speed of these conversions is frightening.

    We are living in terrifying times.

  • Shots are fired

    We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump and the Republican Party intend to demonise trans people and trans allies in their election campaign to distract from that whole “killing 170,000 people and being corrupt on a scale never seen before” thing, and the first shots in that attack have now been fired.

    With the help of the Christmas-voting turkeys in the Log Cabin Republicans, Trump is being positioned as “the most pro-gay president” of all time, an “honour” he gladly accepted despite his administration attempting to roll back rights not just for trans people but for all LGBT+ people. The Log Cabin Republicans, not for the first time, are providing the cover for Trump’s assault on trans Americans while turning a blind eye to his administration’s discriminatory acts towards the entire LGBT+ community.

    And then there’s this, from this week’s Trump speech in Pennsylvania.

    They want to cancel you, totally cancel you. Take your job. Turn your family against you for speaking your mind, while they indoctrinate your children with twisted, twisted world views that nobody ever thought possible

    (Incidentally, if you rewrote that slightly I could convince you it was from a Times or Guardian op-ed or a JK Rowling blog post. That’s how far down the rabbit hole we are right now.)

    Hate crimes against trans people are rising globally because of language like this, and in the US the violent deaths of trans people is expected to reach a record high this year.

    It’s pretty clear who he’s going for here, and what the consequences will be.

  • Facebook fuels hate

    This, by Julia Carrie Wong, was written in 2017.

    Facebook groups – like any social capital – can just as easily be used for ill as good. And social capital is not an unalloyed good. A 2013 study by New York University political scientist Shanker Satyanath, Bowling for Fascism, found that dense networks of social organizations and clubs in Germany helped promote the spread of nazism. And even a cursory search of Facebook unearths networks of extremists using groups to recruit and organize.

    And this is from the same paper this week.

    Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people “controlling the world”. However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that ISD describe as a “conceptual blind spot”.

    The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.

    …A Facebook company spokesperson said: “We take down any post that celebrates, defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust. The same goes for any content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses victims of lying, spews hate, or advocates for violence against Jewish people in any way.

    You’ll note that the words “Holocaust denial” aren’t in that statement. Facebook continues:

    While we do not take down content simply for being untruthful, many posts that deny the Holocaust often violate our policies against hate speech and are removed.

    And many posts that deny the Holocaust do not violate Facebook’s policies and are not removed. I’ve seen this myself: I’ve given up reporting Facebook hate speech, including posts containing Holocaust denial videos, because every time I did Facebook came back and said that the content did not violate their community guidelines.

    When historians write about our era, they will conclude that Mark Zuckerberg was one of the bad guys.

  • Far right in “racist” shocker

    The Independent:

    The British far right is becoming more openly racist in the wake of a backlash against international Black Lives Matter protests, experts have warned.

    A report by Hope Not Hate, seen exclusively by The Independent before its release, said that years of dominance by Tommy Robinson and other figures focused on Muslims was giving way to rising white nationalism.

    The bigotry was always there, but it was toned down for PR purposes.

    [The report author] warned that Patriotic Alternative was “trying to give the friendliest possible face to extremely fascist ideas” by using veiled terminology.

    But Hope Not Hate’s report found that private online chats between members were “awash with extreme racism, Holocaust denial and open veneration of fascism”.

    It said Patriotic Alternative had “antisemitism at its core” and played into conspiracy theories claiming Jews are orchestrating the “replacement” of white Britons.

    There are strong parallels with UK anti-trans activism, sections of which are also openly bigoted: scratch a transphobe and you’ll often find an antisemite, a racist and/or a homophobe. It too perpetuates the conspiracy theory that Jews are orchestrating the “replacement” of white Britons, in this case women. 

    Patriotic Alternative claims that children are being exposed to pro-LGBT and anti-white “propaganda” and advocates home-schooling using its own package of hateful material on “history and culture”.

    Sometimes it’s hard to tell which group of bigots you’re looking at.

  • World-beating

    The UK now has two world-beating achievements to boast of: the highest excess death rate in Europe and the worst drop in GDP of any G7 nation. We’re in the deepest recession since records began.

    As journalist David Osland put it on Twitter:

    It’s lucky that asylum seekers, trans people and Dawn Butler are to blame for everything that’s wrong with Britain. Otherwise people might start thinking the government has got something to do with it.

  • The end of the American dream?

    Another blistering piece about Trump’s America, this time in Rolling Stone.

    Anthropologist Wade Davis describes “the unravelling of America” and argues that COVID-19 “signals the end of the American era.”

    Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

    The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

    …In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

    Empires end because they become failed states, unable to cope with external factors – factors such as global pandemics.

    Patrick Wyman in Mother Jones:

    When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was.

    Davis:

    Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

    …As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

    Wyman:

    We don’t have to wait decades for all this to sink in. The nature of the problem and its scale are clear now, right now, on the cusp of the disaster. Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point has truly been reached. We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their varied depth and location. Perhaps it’s not yet too late to stanch the bleeding.

  • “Ruthless, reckless, dishonest”

    This, in Slate, is devastating. The Trump Pandemic: a blow-by-blow account of how the president killed thousands of Americans.

    The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

    This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

    Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore. But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency. It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

  • Here come the thought police

    A new report says that right-wing academics are being silenced by the thought police. Inevitably they’re talking about that silencing on the front pages of right-wing newspapers.

    Here’s Newsweek.

    There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges. Or, more accurately, hundreds of experiments at different campuses, directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just of the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to “affirm” their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the ’60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence. If they no longer talk of taking to the streets, it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and — when they have the administration on their side — outright coercion.

    Surprise! The Newsweek article is 30 years old. It’s from December 1990.

    As media researcher Becca Lewis notes on Twitter, “it’s really incredible how identical the talking points are, thirty years later.”

  • Sexism is a warning sign

    Jessica Valenti is very tired of writing the same column over and over again.

    I hate that I’m writing this column. Over the years, I’ve published versionafter version of it: how the majority of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence; how misogyny is a clear and obvious indicator of future violence; and how politicians, mainly on the right, refuse to treat it as the epidemic it really is.

    And here I am once again. Just this week, Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and well-known misogynist, allegedly killed the son of a federal judge and wounded her husband in an attack at their New Jersey home.

    …Women knew he was dangerous, but as happens time and time again, what should have been obvious warning signs were ignored.