Pat Bagley, cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Tribune, created this masterpiece about the recent white supremacist mass murder in Buffalo, which was motivated by so-called Replacement Theory:
The 18-year-old killer (who is from my hometown area in the Southern Tier of New York, by the way) was intent on not just killing but terrorizing as many Black people as possible. He got his ideas online, it appears, but the same ideas are repeated these days on Fox News where they reach an even larger audience and are normalized more than they are on marginal corners of the interweb.
As it usually does, thinking of people who follow the Fox News line (or QAnon, or neofascism generally) led me to think about what is to be done about them, and the idea of whether deprogramming is possible. And so I looked back and found one of my posts, which ran on January 30, 2021.
It was one of my first attempts to grapple with the January 6 insurrection in a major way, combining thoughts on Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste with comments from Anand Giridharadas and Dave Roberts.
The parts that seems most applicable to the concept of deprogramming and Bagley's cartoon were the quotes from Roberts. What follows is me quoting myself from that early 2021 post, when I was quoting Roberts around that time.
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On January 8[, 2021], two days after the Capitol insurrection, Roberts wrote this:
"How he was radicalized" is not a mystery, y'all, whether you're asking about the insurrectionist in the Capitol or your cranky uncle. The right wing has spent the better part of 50 years building a machine custom-designed to radicalize people. Nothing was hidden. It is radicalizing tens of thousands of people in the exact same way, even now, as we are speaking.
On January 17, Roberts wrote:
I don't think we really reckon enough with the fact -- as supported by the vast bulk of the research -- that "deprogramming" cult members is a labor-intensive, individualized affair. There's just no way to do it at scale. ...we've basically lost a generation of older white Americans, to say nothing of the younger people (especially suburban women) being pulled into this shit today. Some individuals can be saved, but there's no lever we can pull to bring them all back. They're mostly gone.
Two big implications: one, we'll be dealing with these folks and their distorting effects on politics for the rest of our lives. This is not a "solve" thing, it's a "manage" thing. Second, the top imperative must be cutting off the production of new cultists.
The only scalable solution is reducing supply -- preventing people from being exposed to this toxic shit in the first place. And that raises all kinds of difficult questions about free speech, elite gatekeeping, etc. etc.
No one really loves thinking about that stuff. But that's the only route to a scalable solution. Once you create these cultists, you are, for all intents and purposes, stuck with them.
And then separately on the same date, Roberts wrote:
It just can't be emphasized enough that "you have an obligation to acknowledge empirical truth, no matter its effects on your social or emotional well-being" is a profoundly unnatural, modern idea that tacks directly against centuries of evolution.
Believing what your social group believes, echoing and affirming its common binding precepts, is adaptive. It brings social protection, belonging, and status. What does "believing the truth," in and of itself, get you? Nothing. Why would evolution select for it?
So that's what we're up against, remember: our brains (all of our cognitive biases) and evolution. It's not our fault, though it is our responsibility if we want anything to be different.... Just as the scientific method builds in ways of dealing with human bias, or the balance of powers in the Constitution tried to wrest power from a unitary group or person, we need to build in structural boundaries more broadly now that we know more about our collective faults.
We need to work with what we as humans are because we know how we can go wrong, how we have gone wrong. And as is usually true in this country, a big part of that is listening to Black and Indigenous people, because they've suffered among the most from the consequences.
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The Buffalo mass murder proves it all once again.
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