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Posted: Feb 14, 2020 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Nobody really wants to be honest these days. If they were honest, they would have to admit a few inconvenient truths. First and foremost, they would have to acknowledge that had a Democrat done what President Donald Trump did on that Ukraine phone call, Republicans would be outraged, and Democrats would be excusing it.

Second, Democrats would have to acknowledge that their side is capable of wrongdoing. That may be the most difficult thing for the left to acknowledge, as they are invested in the idea that Trump is uniquely bad. Don't look now, but Barack Obama's IRS targeted conservative groups, and his Department of Justice sold guns to Mexico that got an American border patrol agent killed. But ask your average reporter or progressive activist, and they'll claim with a straight face that the Obama Administration was scandal-free.

The left will tell you that Trump and his supporters are uniquely violent in their tone and rhetoric. They will ignore that Obama told Hispanic voters that the GOP was their enemy, Joe Biden said Mitt Romney would put black people back in chains, and Obama urged his supporters to rat out their neighbors for spreading misinformation during the 2012 election. At a campaign event in 2008, he urged them to take guns to knife fights.

The reality is that neither side is pure, but much of the journalism and punditry of the present age is designed to cover one side in a way that absolves the other of their sins.

Recently, McKay Coppins in The Atlantic wrote a piece titled "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President." It's a great read and covers the extent to which Trump's reelection will feature "coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fear-mongering, and anonymous mass texting."

The story was circulated widely by progressives who smugly denounced the president and his campaign. But the truth is that the Democrats do this, too. In fact, every politician in every presidential campaign has done this. No politician is fully honest. They lie, distort and obfuscate.

Obama upended the American health care system by lying that if you like your doctor, you could keep your doctor. He used the presidency and all the tools available at the time to sell that lie. While lying about it, he created a White House office that encouraged people to rat out "lies" about the Affordable Care Act. Many of those lies were actually true.

Obama's 2012 data-targeting campaign made careers for people covering the rise of digital politics. But in 2016, Trump won using the very techniques online pioneered by the Obama team. The fact that a Republican could outdo Team Obama on Facebook made Facebook bad, after being heralded as a force for good when Obama won. Remember Obama's war on Fox News? Go further back; remember Bill Clinton and the mainstream media blaming Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City Bombing or The New York Times writers blaming Sarah Palin for the Arizona shooting?

A week ago, a man in a van ran through a Republican voter registration tent in Florida. Had it been an "alt-right" person doing it to a Democratic voter registration tent, it'd be national news for days. Consider how quickly the James Hodgkinson shooting spree disappeared from the news coverage.

Democrats are convinced Trump is different. The reality is most of his policy positions are pretty mainstream. Even Trump's behavior is not unique. It is the logical extension of the liberal media turning a blind eye to a supposedly scandal-free administration that used the power of the state to harass nuns, conservative groups and other opponents. But the left will never acknowledge it because to do so, they would have to admit Trump is not the unique boogeyman they have claimed him to be, and they have to take some ownership of the situation.

The reality is that both sides are behaving badly in politics, but they only care to cast aspersions on the other. Our tribalism has become morally relative, and the sins of one side have become virtues to the other.

To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at http://www.creators.com.

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The Moral Relativism of My Tribe - Townhall

We identified in a way that I dont think any white kids of our age did with the struggle of a black man against racism, Ira Glasser tells me, over lunch in an upmarket Manhattan diner.

Glasser, 82, is one of the most important civil-liberties advocates of the past 50 years. He was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, helping to turn it into a powerhouse.

Hes also a lifelong campaigner for racial justice, and hes telling me what is, in effect, his origin story: when Jackie Robinson joined his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, becoming the first African-American to break the colour line and play in Major League Baseball.

Glasser was nine at the time, a self-described street kid from a blue-collar, Democratic Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn. For Glasser, learning about the racism faced by Robinson ignited a lifelong passion for civil rights.

New York had this reputation of being racially and ethnically integrated, he tells me, in the unmistakable Brooklyn accent. But in fact it was composed of very tight, isolated, segregated, not by law but by custom, ethnic tribes.

So where I lived everybody was white and Jewish, and all of our parents were first-generation Americans, born of immigrants, who came in the early 20th century, mostly from Russia and Poland.

But then along came Robinson. The Dodgers players were like a priestly class to us, we worshipped them So were rooting for our team, and theres this wonderful player And we get embroiled, almost without knowing it, in this racial drama.

Suddenly, these little insulated white boys like me find ourselves in the middle of a passion play, he says, in the middle of an onstage, highly visible, national drama what was, in effect, the first major challenge, post-Second World War, against segregation.

Him and his friends found out about racism and Jim Crow listening to Dodgers games on the radio. They learned about the racist barbs Robinson endured and the segregated hotels and restaurants used by the Dodgers when they played around the country.

We hated it. And we didnt hate it because we were civil-rights advocates, we hated it because you cant do that to our guy, he says. I often joke that if Jackie Robinson had come up at the Yankees, I would have been a racist.

Baseball player Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers, 1951.

It really was a sociological phenomenon, he adds, that was not unique to me. When I got to the ACLU, I found there were almost no Yankee fans working there all the men around my age who grew up in New York, and ended up working at the ACLU, were all Dodgers fans.

The ACLU was founded 100 years ago last month, but it was during Glassers tenure that it grew into a giant. As an ACLU press release put it in 2001, announcing Glassers retirement, he transformed it from a mom and pop-style operation to a civil-liberties powerhouse.

Under his leadership, the ACLU became a truly national organisation, with offices fighting legal cases in every state. And he did all this as a non-lawyer who had a background in mathematics and journalism when he first joined libertys law firm.

But Glassers impact was not merely administrative. He helped turn the ACLU into a major force not just for free speech, privacy and due process, and other traditional civil-liberties causes, but also for reproductive freedom, gender equality and racial justice.

When I came into the ACLU there was a distinction that you often heard people make on the national board between what they called civil liberties and civil rights, Glasser says. Im very proud of the fact that we restored racial justice to its proper place, high up on our agenda and second to none.

In fact, it was the civil-rights movement of the Sixties that gave the First Amendment the teeth it has today, says Glasser: The First Amendment had suffered in this country a lot during the McCarthy period, in the Fifties, with all the anti-Communist hysteria. A lot of bad decisions were issued from the Supreme Court.

What revived the First Amendment, in the Sixties, legally, was the civil-rights movement, he goes on. Challenges to clampdowns on civil-rights marches and demonstrations, he says, created most of the good First Amendment law in the Sixties that resulted in protecting everybody else thereafter.

Civil-rights leaders of the times, he says, recognised how important free speech was to their cause. Glasser tells me about a time he was on TV, defending the ACLUs defence of Ku Klux Klan members First Amendment rights. He was sat alongside Hosea Williams, a black civil-rights leader and lieutenant of Martin Luther King.

The moderator turned to Williams, expecting a counterpoint. And Williams says, on national television, that actually he agrees with me, recounts Glasser, because if we allow the state of Georgia to interfere with the free-speech rights of the Klan in Atlanta on Monday, they will use that power to interfere with my organising blacks to vote in Fulton County, north of Atlanta, everyday thereafter.

Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, he says, were the lifeblood of the fight for racial justice: The civil-rights leaders understood out of concrete experience that the first instrument of change they had available to them was demonstrating and marching and organising.

But this idea, Glasser laments, is alien to a lot of young people today, who see the First Amendment as an antagonist to social justice. Indeed on US campuses progressives constantly agitate for right-wing speakers, from Charles Murray to Ben Shapiro, to be banned or forcibly shut them down. Hate speech is not free speech is a common refrain.

This turn away from free speech in academia has a longer history than many realise. In the 1990s, hate-speech codes flourished on US campuses. Glasser recalls going to talk to groups of black students at that time who were pushing for racist speakers to be banned: I told them that it was the most politically stupid thing I had ever heard.

Students at the University of Utah protest against right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, 27 September 2017.

All the deans and the president of the university and the board of trustees were all white. They are not your friends, he says, recalling his advice to them. Hed argue that had such speech codes existed in the Sixties they would have been used most against the likes of Malcolm X and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver:

The only important question in free-speech cases is: who gets to decide? And the answer for oppressed people is: not you. Never you. Never me. Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, theyre the ones who most often have political power. Why would you want to give them the power to decide who should speak?

The only real antagonist of free speech and social justice is power, political power, he adds, before offering a neat analogy: Speech restrictions are like poison gas. They seem like theyre a great weapon when youve got your target in sight. But then the wind shifts.

Clearly, for all the difficulties we might face today, the principled argument for free speech even for those we hate, and who hate us has never been an easy one to make.

We move on to 1977 and Skokie, the ACLUs defining case. In it, the ACLU successfully defended the right of the National Socialist Party of America a small group of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collin to march through a Chicago suburb called Skokie, estimated to be home to 7,000 Holocaust survivors.

Local government filed an injunction and passed ordinances to stop the march from going ahead, and the ACLU took up Collins case. At the time, Glasser was executive director of the NYCLU, the ACLUs New York affiliate. So he was charged with making the case to his members there.

In New York, we probably had the largest concentration of Jews among ACLU members than anybody in the country. So I got a lot of shit, he says. I would go to synagogues and talk about Skokie to Jews who were adults when World War Two happened, who were haunted, either personally or familially, by the Holocaust.

The way in with people, he says, was to take their fears and their intellect seriously. Jews had good reason to be afraid of people marching around with swastikas But if you wanted to take that seriously you had to understand that what happened in Germany didnt happen because there was a good First Amendment there. It happened because there wasnt.

Indeed Weimar Germany had on statute what we would today call hate-speech laws, and Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher were prosecuted for their vicious libels of Jews. In turn, they used the attention to promote their cause and pose as martyrs.

When the Nazis eventually came to power, it was state power, not individual liberty, that brought about barbarism.

The first time Jews got attacked in the streets by agents of the government or militias that were fronts for the government, there was no constitution to restrain them, or a federal court system that would enforce this, Glasser says. It was the absence of those restraints that enabled that to rise.

The Skokie case sparked a national debate, and lost the ACLU members and donations as a consequence. But as it turned out, Skokie became a demonstration of the fact that the best way to challenge hateful speech is with more speech, not censorship.

The Holocaust survivor Jews of Skokie organised a counter-demonstration, recounts Glasser. They had like 60,000 people ready to come march against these 15 people. And in the end, after we won the right for Collin and his group to go to Skokie, they chose not to go, because they would have been completely humiliated.

The legal argument with Skokie was never in doubt: the ordinances were in breach of the First Amendment. But it was a landmark case in that it burnished the ACLUs credentials as a principled defender of free speech, not least because many Jewish people worked on the case.

The executive director of the ACLU during this time was Aryeh Neier, a German-born Jew whose family fled Berlin in 1939. His landmark book on the Skokie case bears the powerful title, Defending My Enemy.

For all the flak the ACLU caught over Skokie, it was the ultimate test of principle, and it passed. Fast forward to today, however, and Glasser is worried the ACLU would now flunk that test.

In August 2017, a mix of alt-right, neo-fascist and white-nationalist groups gathered in the Virginia city of Charlottesville, for what they called the Unite the Right rally.

It was sparked by the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E Lee the Confederate commander from a local park, but was also intended as a show of strength from the racist right.

The Unite the Right rally passing the statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee, in Charlottesville, Virginia, 12 August 2017.

Many of them turned up armed, and clashed with anti-fascist protesters. One counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 others were injured when James Alex Fields deliberately rammed his car into her group.

The city had originally tried to revoke the racists permit to demonstrate. The ACLU of Virginia was approached by the Unite the Right organisers, and took the case, eventually overturning the ban.For this, it was immediately accused of siding with bigotry, and after the carnage of the 12 August, of enabling Heyers murder: a ACLU of Virginia board member resigned, saying his organisation was defend[ing] Nazis to allow them to kill people.

Glasser passionately disagrees. The ACLU of Virginia took exactly the right decision, he says. The descent into violence that occurred in Charlottesville was not a problem of the First Amendment. It was a problem of police incompetence.

You have to vindicate the rights of both [protesters and counter-protesters], he says. If anybody gets violent on either side, you gotta bust em, for the violence, not the speech. In New York City, he adds, this would never have happened, given its long history of policing contentious demonstrations.

At a glance, it might seem that the ACLU held to its principles over Charlottesville, just as it did with Skokie 40 years before it. But the truth is almost the precise opposite: the response of the ACLU leadership to the tragedy was to beat a hasty retreat.

A month after Charlottesville, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told the Wall Street Journal that the ACLU would look at the facts of any white-supremacy protests with a much finer comb in future. In particular, it would no longer defend people who intended to march armed.

The murder was not committed by the people carrying the guns, is Glassers response. The murder was committed by the guy driving the car. And I never remember the ACLU saying a word when the Black Panthers marched around in the Sixties with guns.

A follow-up statement from Romero went even further, arguing that the First Amendment absolutely does not protect white supremacists seeking to incite or engage in violence.

In Europe, where incitement is much more broadly defined, this might sound uncontroversial. But as former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer pointed out, Romeros comments amount to support for prior restraints on speech, something the First Amendment prohibits.

Things continued to unravel. A year later, Kaminer went public with an internal document, leaked to her by an ACLU staffer, that seemed to urge ACLU members to think twice before defending the rights of racists and fascists.

These guidelines, nodding to the Charlottesville controversy, urged members to take into account the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values when selecting cases.

Romero Glassers successor has denied this is what the document means. But Glasser is unconvinced. This is all reflective, he says, of ambivalence and confusion, which adds up to a dilution, a weakening, of the First Amendment advocacy that the ACLU exists for.

Then comes the killer blow:

I believe that the national ACLU, if the Skokie case arose today, would not take it. They might take the same case for the Martin Luther King Jr Association, but they wouldnt take it for the Nazis.

As Kaminer has long argued, the rot has been setting in for some time. But in the wake of Trumps election, the ACLU seemed to have been more noticeably shying away from contentious free-speech cases.

As a New York Times report put it in 2017, in the first months of the Trump presidency, the ACLU seemed to be more cautious about which fights it would embrace, adding that it stayed uncharacteristically quiet when Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter were banned by the University of California, Berkeley.

Glasser sees the leaderships shift as a response to generational change within the organisation: What my successor is doing is demagogic, hes pandering to what he thinks his new constituency wants to hear. The staff by now must be in their twenties and thirties Theyve been socialised into a different ACLU.

Romero may well be pandering to the ACLUs new supporters, as well. In the wake of Trumps election, the ACLU began to position itself as part of the anti-Trump Resistance, and it has paid off. Membership quadrupled in a year and donations hit $120million, 25 times what it raised the previous year.

The ACLU has filed hundreds of lawsuits and legal actions against the Trump administration. Many of them are in keeping with the ACLUs mission, such as those challenging the travel ban, which it fought on religious-freedom and due-process grounds.

But the ACLU has also waded, explicitly, into partisan political issues, at precisely the same time as it was retreating on First Amendment issues.

We will be moving further into political spaces across the country as we fight to prevent and dismantle the Trump agenda, wrote Romero, in March 2017. Ironically, it was in a piece about the ACLUs nonpartisanship.

He argues that the ACLUs oppositional stance against this president is justified because of the unprecedented threat to our civil liberties his administration poses. Thats a contestable position.

But, even so, it doesnt really justify the ACLU weighing in on the subject of healthcare, as it did in the battles over Obamacare, nor it putting out political ads for and against particular candidates (no prizes for guessing which parties they respectively belong to).

I regard all this as tragic, laments Glasser. Not because an organisation doesnt have the right to change and say we dont want to be a civil-liberties organisation anymore, we want to be a progressive, social-justice organisation. It can do that.

But theres two problems with that, he explains. One is, while its doing it, its denying that its doing it. Its being intellectually dishonest. And the second thing is, that there is nothing to replace it.

If Planned Parenthood decided tomorrow to get out of the abortion-clinic business, it would be a blow to reproductive rights. But there are other organisations that take the same position. But there is no other civil-liberties organisation like the ACLU.

As our lunch draws to a close, Glasser tells me why he decided to take his first job at the ACLU back in the Sixties. And its a hell of a story.

Just as Jackie Robinson lit his lifelong passion for civil rights, Bobby Kennedy brother of John F, former attorney general, and presidential candidate until his assasination in June 1968 convinced him that the ACLU was an organisation worth working for.

Bobby Kennedy on an airplane during his presidential election tour, 1968.

In the mid-to-late Sixties, Glasser was working at a public-affairs magazine, but was hoping to branch into politics. He saw Kennedy as a man who, if he ran for president, could offer hope to a nation roiled by unrest, and he dreamed of one day working for him.

I thought, on issues of race and the war in Vietnam, he really got it, Glasser says. He wasnt a traditional liberal, in that he had an appeal to the white working class as well as an appeal to blacks I just thought that he was the most hopeful political future.

Then, in 1966, a twentysomething Glasser wrote Kennedy an extraordinary letter, explaining what he saw in him, why he should run for president, and why he thought he could help.

Remarkably, Glasser got a meeting with Kennedy in Washington. I end up having a one-on-one meeting with him for like 40 minutes. As executive director of the ACLU I dont think I ever had a meeting with a United States senator by myself for 40 minutes.

Kennedy had not yet decided to run, so there was no role for Glasser. But he urged him to stay in touch, and asked what he might do next.

Glasser mentioned that his friend and former colleague, Aryeh Neier, had offered him a job at the NYCLU. But he had turned it down, thinking the ACLU was too narrow and legalistic for his interests.

Kennedy urged him to reconsider. As Glasser recalls, he said it was a unique organisation in American life that represents a radical idea radical in the sense of going to the root of what the countrys principles and values are really all about, while still operating through mainstream channels.

Theres no other organisation like it Youre wrong about it being too narrow, he told Glasser.

Glasser took his advice, albeit with an eye still on politics. In 1968, when Kennedy jumped in the race, he was hoping to join the team. But then Kennedy was shot. It was like the ground was just taken out from under me, he says.

So he stuck around at the NYCLU. He rose to become executive director, where he learned how to run an organisation, and got involved in the campaign to impeach Nixon after Watergate another big highlight, he says. In 1978, when Aryeh Neier left the national office, Glasser got the top job.

To this day, he credits Kennedy with him ending up in a career he loved. In a very real sense, I dont think without that conversation with Kennedy that would have happened, he says. More than 50 years later, hes still stunned by the insight Kennedy had then:

For a guy who was not a traditional liberal, who came out of a kind of autocratic family, who worked for Joe McCarthy, who did not have civil-liberties credentials, to put it mildly For him to understand what the ACLU was, in a way that I, as a traditional card-carrying liberal didnt understand, was really remarkable.

Ive now reached the age where Im starting to tell not only history stories, but my history stories, Glasser jokes, as we get the cheque. It starts with Jackie Robinson and it ends with Bobby Kennedy those are the bookends. And the ACLU ended up being the job of my dreams.

Glasser is coming up on two decades of retirement. Though he continues to serve as president of the board of the Drug Policy Alliance, ending the war on drugs being another key cause of his, he devotes much of his time now to his family, the gym, the beach, and of course ball games.

Still, his passion for civil liberties clearly remains undimmed. If only the same could be said for the organisation he once ran.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Main picture by: Tom Slater.

In-article pictures by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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'The ACLU would not take the Skokie case today' - Spiked

Upon receiving the press release Wednesday afternoon, I let out an audible groan: Steve Bannon, the former Trump consigliere, fascist propagandist, and failed documentary filmmaker, would be the big top-of-show interview guest on Bill Mahers popular HBO series Real Time Friday night.

Having interviewed Bannon in the past, including a fairly heated three-hour back and forth in his lux Venetian hotel suite that lasted into the wee hours, I know how much of a charismatic charmer he can be, which, in addition to his serving as a valued source for so many White House reporters, is a big reason why hes been subject to so many fawning profiles. Such cajoling can easily work on Maher, who not only loves having his colossal ego massaged but has found common ground with everyone from alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to, well, Steve Bannon, who talked circles around the late-night comedian during his last Real Time appearance.

Which brings us to Friday night.

Following an impeachment-heavy monologue (I feel like Nancy Pelosis copy of the State of the Union), and calling it Trumps best week ever following his acquittal by the Senate, Maher welcomed Bannon, whos recently made headlines for pushing debunked claims about the spread of the coronavirus, onto the show, airing live while the Democratic debate in New Hampshire was still ongoing. And, well, things got weird.

First question? Im not gonna lie about it, your boy had the best week so far. (Yes, that was really the opening question.)

After allowing Bannon to gloat a bit, Maherreferring to Bannon as a student of historyinterjected, asking, whether anything this week in Trumpworld bothered him, including the firing of Vindman, calling Romney a suppressive person (Mahers words), bragging about how he wouldnt have been in office if he hadnt fired FBI Director Comey, etc.

We shouldve had a longer impeachment. We shouldve had Bolton, we shouldve had Mulvaneywitnesses, let em get crossed, but we get the whistleblower, we get the second whistleblower, we get Schiff as a factor in this, lets get it all out. said Bannon, adding, that this is about going after the office of the president, and if Bernie gets elected, the neoliberal, neocon national-security apparatus will go after him, too. (Though Bernie has not, like Trump, committed a number of crimes whilst in office.)

They agreed that Trump will run the table and be re-elected, and that the Democrats are incredibly arrogant, and that Hillary should have gone to Wisconsin, but lightly tussled over the merits of the Electoral College.

Bannon also rambled on about Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russiaforwarding the (debunked) right-wing conspiracy theory that the investigation was politically-motivatedbut Maher instead changed the subject, and instead of breaking down and exposing Bannons arguments for how empty they are, chose to focus on Trumps bad words, and Bannon successfully steered the talk elsewhere, as is his wont.

They agreed that Trump will run the table and be re-elected, and that the Democrats are incredibly arrogant, and that Hillary should have gone to Wisconsin, but lightly tussled over the merits of the Electoral College.

And Bannon, playing three-dimensional chess, admitted that he likes Bernie because hes a populist, and that Bernies been screwed by the Democratic Party, to which Maher politely agreed. The two then shared some laughs going at it over the debt, discussed the silly names Trumps called Bannon (he deflected once more), and then Maher allowed Bannon to deliver his closing statement, uninterrupted, before remarking, I wish we had someone on our side as evil as you, Steve. Pathetic.

Maher has made it plainly clear that he is unequipped to handle such incendiary figures on his program. So, why does he do it? Ratings? Controversy? Or both?

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Steve Bannon Outduels Bill Maher on 'Real Time' - The Daily Beast

Alena Petitt, a well-known author and lifestyle blogger, has become the British face of the Tradwife movement, closely associated with the hashtag #TradWife. The movement harks back to an earlier era, encouraging women to take pleasure in traditional domestic duties while promoting feminine submissiveness, domesticity, and wifehood.

In a BBC clip, Petitt explains that her role is to submit to, serve, and spoil her husband like its 1959.

Writing on her website, The Darling Academy, she adds that many women crave a sense of belonging and home and quaintness, and therefore choose to become homemakers where husbands must always come first.

Given its glorification of traditional femininity, the Tradwife movement is often framed in the media as a backlash against feminism. This can been seen in news stories featuring bitter disagreements between feminist critics and women who embrace a tradwife identity.

This emphasis on tradwives vs feminists is sadly predictable. It fits the all-too-familiar trope of catfighting so often characterising conversations about feminist politics in the media. This framing, wittingly or unwittingly, identifies feminism as the problem, ignoring the larger structural issues at stake.

Rather than simply a backlash against feminism, the tradwife phenomenon needs to be understood as a symptom of as well as a reaction to the increasing insecurity of our times.

Tradwives often use the language of choice. They describe their decision to step off the treadmill of work as a true calling to be homemakers, mothers and wives. But even the most private of choices like deciding to leave a career and become a full-time housewife are always made within structural constraints. As one of us (Shani) shows in the book Heading Home, these choices are always shaped by social, cultural, economic and political conditions.

Many of the women in tradwife groups discuss the strain of working in demanding jobs and the difficulty of coming home to, what the American writer Arlie Hochschild has famously called, the second shift. This includes tending to children and household chores, as well as looking after elderly family members.

Petitt herself talks about how in her early twenties she was a driven career woman. Another self-identifying tradwife, Jenny Smith (pseudonym), recounts working long days as a finance administrator before dramatically changing course.

The current toxic always-on work culture must be understood as a key factor facilitating the rise of this retro-movement. As overload work culture has become common in many developed countries, governments have also been cutting vital resources that help support families and communities. Combined with entrenched gendered social norms, the burden of care disproportionately falls on women. Even relatively privileged women therefore find it difficult to live up to the popular feminist ideal of work-life balance.

So although at first blush the Tradwife movement may seem profoundly at odds with our times particularly in the wake of movements likes MeToo and TimesUp it is very much a product of the contemporary moment. The choices made by women who identify as tradwives may be presented as entirely personal. However, they are inseparable from the profound crisis of both work and care under neoliberal capitalism.

We live in a time when normative gender roles and dominant notions of sexuality have not only been challenged but are in flux. As such, reasserting a narrowly defined version of femininity may be a way for some women to gain a sense of control over their lives.

Being a tradwife is empowering and has enabled me to take back control of my life, explains Stacey McCall. A 33-year old tradwife, she quit her job due to the pressures of her and her husband both working in demanding full-time jobs.

Unsurprisingly, the movement is aligned with notions of traditional Britishness in the UK, and, as some have suggested, with the alt-right in the US. Despite their nominal differences, however, both movements are united by a similar nostalgia for an imagined harmonious national past, which has a form of gender traditionalism at its heart.

Tradwife blogs and videos are filled with serene settings outside the world of neoliberal capitalist work. Retro 1950s images of women as happy housewives abound. Yet paradoxically, this nostalgic return to a simpler and better past is dependent on the very values that it seemingly rejects.

Tradwives like Alena Petitt in the UK and US blogger Dixie Andelin Forsyth have become successful entrepreneurs who monetize their trad-wifehood. The movement, more generally, depends on savvy entrepreneurial women like these, who, through their social media activities, classes, courses, advice books, and products, advocate and popularise trad-wifehood as a desirable choice and identity.

Far from refusing neoliberal capitalism, the world of paid full-time labour or even what some consider feminist success, the Tradwife movement is deeply embedded in and indebted to all of them.

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Tradwives: the women looking for a simpler past but grounded in the neoliberal present - The Conversation UK

In 2012, a small group of young men, former supporters of the libertarian Republican congressman Ron Paul, started a blog called The Right Stuff. They soon began calling themselves post-libertarians, although they werent yet sure what would come next. By 2014, theyd started to self-identify as alt-right. They developed a countercultural tone arch, antic, floridly offensive that appealed to a growing cohort of disaffected young men, searching for meaning and addicted to the internet. These young men often referred to The Right Stuff, approvingly, as a key part of a libertarian-to-far-right pipeline, a path by which normies could advance, through a series of epiphanies, toward full radicalisation. As with everything the alt-right said, it was hard to tell whether they were joking, half-joking or not joking at all.

The Right Stuff s founders came up with talking points narratives, they called them that their followers then disseminated through various social networks. On Facebook, they posted Photoshopped images, or parody songs, or countersignal memes sardonic line drawings designed to spark just enough cognitive dissonance to shock normies out of their complacency. On Twitter, the alt-right trolled and harassed mainstream journalists, hoping to work the referees of the national discourse while capturing the attention of the wider public. On Reddit and 4chan and 8chan, where the content moderation was so lax as to be almost non-existent, the memes were more overtly vile. Many alt-right trolls started calling themselves fashy, or fash-ist. They referred to all liberals and traditional conservatives as communists, or degenerates; they posted pro-Pinochet propaganda; they baited normies into arguments by insisting that Hitler did nothing wrong.

When I first saw luridly ugly memes like this, in 2014 and 2015, I wasnt sure how seriously to take them. Everyone knows the most basic rule of the internet: dont feed the trolls, and dont take tricksters at their word. The trolls of the alt-right called themselves provocateurs, or shitposters, or edgelords. And what could be edgier than joking about Hitler? For a little while, I was able to avoid reaching the conclusion that would soon become obvious: maybe they meant what they said.

I spent about three years immersing myself in two worlds: the world of these edgelords meta-media insurgents who arrayed themselves in opposition to almost all forms of traditional gatekeeping and the world of the new gatekeepers of Silicon Valley, who, whether intentionally or not, afforded the gatecrashers their unprecedented power.

The left won by seizing control of media and academia, a blogger on The Right Stuff, using the pseudonym Meow Blitz, wrote in 2015. With the internet, they lost control of the narrative. By the left, he meant the whole standard range of American culture and politics everyone who preferred democracy to autocracy, everyone who resisted the alt-rights vision of a white American ethnostate.

For decades, Meow Blitz argued, this pluralistic worldview the mainstream worldview had gone effectively unchallenged, but now, by promoting their agenda on social media, he and his fellow propagandists could push the US in a more fascist-friendly direction. Isis became the most powerful terrorist group in the world because of flashy internet videos, he wrote. If youre alive in the year 2015 and you dont understand the power of the interwebz youre an idiot.

To the posts intended audience, this was supposed to be invigorating. To me, it was more like a faint whiff of sulphur that may or may not turn out to be a gas leak. The post was called Right Wing Trolls Can Win. Would the neofascists win? I had a hard time imagining it. Could they win? That was a different question. The culture war is being fought daily from your smartphone, the post continued. On this one point, at least, I had to agree with Meow Blitz. To change how we talk is to change who we are.

During the long 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump seemed to draw on pools of dark energy not previously observed within the universe of the American electorate. The mainstream media used the catchall term alt-right, which appealed to newspaper editors and TV-news producers who hoped to connote frisson and novelty without passing explicit judgment. Instead of denouncing the alt-right, reporters often described it as divisive or racially charged. They tried to present both sides neutrally, as journalistic convention seemed to require.

The definition of alt-right continued to expand. By the summer of 2016, it was such a big tent that it included any conservative or reactionary who was active online and too belligerently anti-establishment to feel at home in the Republican party a category that included the Republican nominee for president. This was an oddly broad definition for what was supposed to be a fringe movement, and yet no one seemed eager to clear up the semantic confusion. The Clinton campaign played up the alt-rights size and influence, while the alt-right was all too glad to be perceived as vast and menacing. There was no way to measure precisely how many Americans were alt-right, and there never would be. Estimates ranged from a few hundred to a few million. Still, what mattered was not the movements headcount, but its collective impact on the national vocabulary.

Were the platform for the alt-right, Steve Bannon said in July 2016, when he was running the pro-Trump web tabloid Breitbart. Later that year, after leading the Trump campaign to victory and being tapped to serve as chief White House strategist, Bannon claimed that hed only meant to align himself with an insurgent brand of civic nationalism, not with ethno-nationalism. Yet a core within the movement still insisted on a narrower definition of alt-right, one based on explicit antisemitism and white supremacy. This core had always existed; no one who was versed in the far-right blogosphere could have missed it.

Mainstream journalists, or at least the ones who were paying attention, were daunted by the fiscal precarity of their industry, the plummeting cultural authority of their institutions, and the unpredictable dynamics of social media outrage. The more these threats loomed, the more journalists clung to one of the few professional axioms that still seemed beyond dispute: in all matters of political opinion, a reporter should strive to remain neutral. This is true enough, for certain kinds of journalists, when applied to certain prosaic debates about tariffs and treaties. When it comes to core matters of principle, though, its not always possible to be both even-handed and honest. The plain fact was that the alt-right was a racist movement full of creeps and liars. If a newspapers house style didnt allow its reporters to say so, at least by implication, then the house style was preventing its reporters from telling the truth.

Neutrality has never been a universal good, even in the simplest of times. In unusual times say, when the press has been drafted, without its consent or comprehension, into a dirty culture war neutrality might not always be possible. Some questions arent really questions at all. Should Muslim Americans be treated as real Americans? Should women be welcome in the workplace? To treat these as legitimate topics of debate is to be not neutral, but complicit. Sometimes, even for a journalist, there is no such thing as not picking a side.

In April 2014, looking for new story ideas, I attended a tech conference in a stylish hotel in Lower Manhattan. The conference was called F.ounders, a word that no one, including the founders of F.ounders, could decide how to pronounce. Half of us stammered over the stray full stop. The other half ignored it. It stood for nothing, apparently, except for the general concept of innovation.

At this point, Google owned almost 40% of the online advertising market, and Facebook owned another 10%. Some analysts were already warning that they might comprise a duopoly. Both companies business models, especially Facebooks, were built around microtargeting. Filter bubbles, in other words, were not a temporary bug but a central feature of social media. It was hard to see how the latter could flourish without the former. If filter bubbles were bad for democracy, then, were Google and Facebook also bad for democracy?

It was a fair question, almost an obvious one, and yet the cultural vocabulary of the time did not allow most people to hold it in their heads for long. The Arab spring of 2011 had been organised, in part, via social media, and was often called the Twitter revolution. Mark Zuckerberg had been named Times person of the year in 2010; in the hagiographic cover photo, his eyes were oceanic and farseeing, dreaming up ingenious new ways to forge human bonds. If some movies and books portrayed him as shifty, even a bit ruthless, it was still possible to imagine that ruthlessness, in the tradition of Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, was merely the cost of doing business. Zuckerbergs motto, Move fast and break things, was generally treated as a sign of youthful insouciance, not of galling rapacity. Facebooks users more than a billion of them seemed happy. Its investors were delighted. If social media wasnt a good product, then why was it so successful?

At the time, it was still considered divisive (at swanky New York tech conferences, anyway) to wonder whether the be-hoodied young innovators of Silicon Valley might turn out to be robber barons. It was far more socially acceptable to extol the gleaming vehicle of technology to gaze in amoral awe at its speed and vigour than to ask precisely where it was headed, or whether it might one day hurtle off a cliff. Such questions had come to seem fusty and antidemocratic; people who spent too much time worrying about them were often dismissed as cranks or luddites. To a techno-optimist, there was only one way the vehicle could possibly be going: forward.

When it was founded in 2004, Facebook billed itself as an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. Within a few years, this self-description had morphed into a far more grandiose mission statement: Facebook gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Mark Zuckerberg was careful not to call himself a gatekeeper. On the contrary, he portrayed himself as a Robin Hood figure, snatching power from the gatekeepers and redistributing it to the people, who could presumably be trusted to do the right thing.

The traditional gatekeeper media that held sway in the US in the middle of the 20th century was, inarguably, a deeply flawed system. The nations most prominent journalists, from celebrity newscasters to unheralded assignment editors, were, by and large, upper-middle-class white men in grey suits. Many were blinkered coastal elites, either too circumspect or too myopic to risk departing meaningfully from the socially acceptable narrative, even when elements of that narrative were misleading or flat-out false. But what if the fourth estate turned out to be, like democracy, the worst system except for all the others? If history was an arc bending inexorably toward justice, then there was no need to worry about any of this technological disruption could only lead the world more efficiently in the right direction. If history was contingent, however, then removing the gatekeepers, without any clear notion of what might replace them, could throw the whole information ecosystem into chaos.

At a F.ounders dinner, the seating algorithm placed me next to Emerson Spartz, a 27-year-old with the saucer eyes and cuspidate chin of a cartoon fawn. His bio described him as a middle-school dropout, a New York Times bestselling author and the founder and CEO of Spartz Inc, based in Chicago. I asked what his company made, or did, or was. Im passionate about virality, he responded. I must have looked confused, because he said: Let me bring that down from the 30,000-foot level. The appetiser course had not yet arrived. He checked the time on his cell phone, then cleared his throat.

Every day, when I was a kid, my parents made me read four short biographies of very successful people, he said. I decided that I wanted to change the world, and I wanted to do it on a massive scale. This was the beginning of what I would come to recognize as his standard pitch for Spartz, both the person and the company. Although he had an audience of one, he spoke in a distant and deliberate tone, using studied pauses and facial expressions, as if I were a conference hall or a camera lens.

I looked at patterns, he said. I realised that if you could make ideas go viral, you could tip elections, start movements, revolutionise industries. He told me that Spartz Inc specialised in fun stuff entertainment, not hard news. He called it a media company, but it sounded more like an aggregator and distributor of pre-existing content. The ability to spread a meme to millions of people, he continued, was the closest you can come to a human superpower.

As far as I could tell, Emerson Spartz wasnt using his memetic superpower either for good or for evil, exactly. He was using it mainly to monetise cat gifs. He told me that his company oversaw about 30 active sites, each serving up procrastination fodder for adolescents of all ages: Memestache (All the Funny Memes), OMGFacts (The Worlds #1 Fact Source), GivesMeHope (Chicken Soup for the Soul the 21st-century, Twitter-style version). The content was mostly user-generated and unvetted, and it just kept rolling in.

Even though Im one of the most avid readers I know, I dont usually read straight news, he told me. Its conveyed in a very boring way, and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again.

Still, he was happy to offer advice. Glancing down at my laminated badge for the first time, Spartz noticed that I worked at the New Yorker. For instance, heres how I would improve your product, he said. Way more images. Thats number one. Who has ever looked at a big long block of text and gone, Ooh, exciting? I tell my employees all the time: Every paragraph they write should be super-short, no more than three sentences. And I mean short sentences. Periods are better than commas. Boredom is the enemy.

I couldnt deny that this sounded like an effective recipe for a certain kind of success. And yet, I sputtered, if maximising clicks was the only goal, why would any magazine or newspaper need to employ fact-checkers or reporters, for that matter? Why not simply recycle press releases, rewriting the boring quotes to make them snappier? Why not replace all Syria coverage with Kardashian coverage? Why not forget about words altogether and go into something more remunerative, like video, or mobile gaming, or strip mining?

Spartz cocked his head and waited for me to finish my rant. Clearly, in his eyes, I was revealing myself to be a luddite. Its always possible to make a slippery-slope argument, he said. Those arguments dont interest me. Im interested in impact. Art without an audience was mere solipsism, he said. The ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, its quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, thats fine. Not everybody has to change the world.

Spartz, in his speeches, sometimes referred to himself as a growth hacker. In practice, though, he was more like a day trader, investing in memes that appeared to have momentum. Exactly where we find our source material took a lot of experimentation to get right, he said. But the core of it is simple: taking stuff thats already going viral and repackaging it. His proprietary algorithm scoured the internet for images and stories that seemed to be generating a lot of activating emotion (at least, according to the relevant metrics). The content producers then acted as arbitrageurs, adapting those images and stories into lists on Dose, his flagship site. Sometimes this required a bit of reassembly; other times, it was as simple as copying the source material in full, without bothering to rearrange any images or correct any typos, and then reposting it on Dose under a catchier headline.

In 2014, there were governmental regulations, imperfect though they may have been, preventing pharmaceutical companies from filling their gelcaps with sawdust, or public-school teachers from filling their lesson plans with Holocaust denialism. Media was different. For many good reasons, starting with the first amendment, the information market was relatively unregulated. And yet everyone knew the bromides, no less true for being trite, about how a democracy cant function without a well-informed electorate. In the near future, what was to prevent large swaths of the internet including the parts of the internet that used to be called newspapers and magazines from looking more and more like Dose? What was insulating the American press from a full-speed race to the bottom? Nothing, as far as I could tell, other than tradition and inertia and the capricious whims of the market.

Spartz was proud to make a living on the internet, he said, because it was the closest humanity had yet come to creating a pure meritocracy. At the 30,000-foot level, the internet is a giant machine that gives people what they want, Spartz said. How can you do better than that? It exposes people to the best stuff in the world.

I made the obvious rejoinder: it also exposes people to the worst stuff in the world.

Well, that would be your subjective judgment, he said, pique rising in his voice. Thats you paternalistically deciding whats bad for people. Besides, businesses exist to serve the market. You can have whatever personal values you want, but businesses that dont provide what the customers want dont remain businesses. Literally, never.

Once, Spartz told me, The future of media is an ever-increasing degree of personalisation. My CNN wont look like your CNN. So we want Dose eventually to be tailored to each user. On a whiteboard behind him were the phrases old media, Tribune and $100 M. He continued: You shouldnt have to choose what you want, because we will be able to get enough data to know what you want better than you do.

In Liars Poker, his 1989 Wall Street memoir, Michael Lewis described a newly ascendant, egregiously conceited type of alpha-male bond broker. This type had a name: they called each other Big Swinging Dicks. Everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, Lewis wrote, even the women.

A quarter of a century later, the A-list entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley occupied an analogous place in the American power structure, but their self-presentation was less aggressive. Instead of Greed is good, their aspirational bromides were Think different and Dont be evil. Instead of Dionysian feats of consumption Porsches and cocaine binges and morning cheeseburgers they drove electric cars and subsisted on seaweed and Soylent. They didnt deny themselves the pleasures of good old-fashioned capital, but they were equally covetous of social and intellectual capital. Their fondest wish was to be considered luminaries, Renaissance men, the smartest guys in the room. They were Big Swinging Brains.

There is much to discover on the Facebook, the online community for college students, a Washington Post reporter wrote in the papers Style section in late 2004. She did warn, however, that its all a little fake the friends; the profiles that can be tailored to what others find appealing; the groups that exist only in cyberspace. A few weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg, looking for investors, visited the office of the Washington Post and met with Donald Graham, the papers publisher and CEO. They agreed on a verbal deal: the Post would pay $6m for 10% of the company. Zuckerberg later called Graham in tears a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm had offered a more generous investment, and he was tempted to take it. Graham, impressed by the young mans display of rectitude, gave him his blessing to renege on the deal. Three years later, Graham joined Facebooks board of directors. Facebook has completely transformed how people interact, he said in a press release. Marks sense of what Facebook can do is quite remarkable.

In 2007, a Washington Post columnist lamented the rapid ascent of Amazon.com, which was so smart in the way they cater to human weakness, bad judgment, poor taste. In 2008, another Washington Post columnist wrote: I loathe Amazon even though I know it is the future and will prevail. In 2013, with revenue in decline, Donald Graham sold the Washington Post, which his family had owned and overseen for 80 years, to Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, soon to be the richest person in the world.

By that time, it no longer made sense to think of business and tech and media as separate entities. Business was tech, and tech was taking over everything: movies, TV, travel, journalism. Whether the nerd princelings of Silicon Valley understood themselves to be gatekeepers or not, it was becoming increasingly clear that their smallest impromptu decisions were having enormous downstream effects on how billions of people spoke and thought and, ultimately, acted in the world. To change how we talk is to change who we are.

I wondered whether they found this power burdensome, and if so, whether they found the burden humbling, or overwhelming the way I would feel over-whelmed if I woke up to discover that I had somehow been put in charge of the energy grid, or some other key piece of infrastructure that I didnt fully understand. Maybe Big Swinging Brains were constitutionally incapable of feeling overwhelmed. In any case, there was no law that said you had to understand a piece of social infrastructure in order to own it, or to break it.

Business was tech and tech was media. Content was content was content, and coders controlled the sluices through which all content flowed. The luminaries of Silicon Valley didnt hesitate to offer their bold opinions on almost every subject; and yet, when it came to basic questions about the future of media, their rhetoric turned fuzzy. Businesses should give customers what they want. Media companies should meet audiences where they are. Journalism should be objective and thorough. These truisms seemed unobjectionable enough until they came into conflict with one another, which happened all the time. What if your customers claimed to want rigorous, dispassionate journalism, but their browsing habits revealed that they actually wanted hot takes and salacious hate-reads? What if, in order to meet customers where they were, you had to bowdlerise your writing, or give up on writing altogether and pivot to video? What if quality and popularity were sometimes correlated negatively, or not at all?

In early 2016, I was invited to a lunch discussion in an executive boardroom. At the head of the table, a Big Swinging Brain one of the Biggest talked for more than an hour without touching his sandwich. He dilated on a wide array of topics (state healthcare exchanges, the future of the trucking industry, the financial panic of 1873), displaying uncanny recall and mental acuity. He acknowledged dilemmas and contradictions in his thinking; he even pointed out awkward conflicts between what he found preferable economically and what might be preferable civically, even morally. I began to wonder whether Id underestimated the BSBs. Maybe I should learn to stop worrying and love my overlords.

Then I asked him a question about the importance of good journalism and good art, the corrosive effects of bad journalism and bad art, and the best way to forestall the Spartzification of the internet. It seemed clear not just to me, but to anyone who was paying attention that things were drifting in an unnerving direction. How would humanity avoid a clickbait death spiral?

I dont think theres an answer to that, he said, his tone suddenly turning flinty. Apparently I had revealed myself to be a luddite. If I were in the media business, I would focus on making a product that people actually want. Because thats how business works.

I couldnt imagine him being so flippantly fatalistic about any other civilisational hazard that the free market had failed to address. The Renaissance men of Silicon Valley were known for spending an unusual amount of time and money addressing thorny problems, such as the achievement gap in American public schools and the excess of carbon in the atmosphere. They even invested millions of dollars in problems that hadnt come into existence yet, such as hostile AI. In 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the nonprofit founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced its intention to help cure, prevent, and manage all disease in our childrens lifetime; several well-capitalised bioengineering start-ups, including a $1.5bn initiative at Google, went even further, resolving to cure death. But somehow the BSBs balked at the problem of addictive, low-quality clickbait. They had taken control of the media industry, then moved fast and broken it; now they claimed no responsibility for fixing it.

The techno-utopians of Silicon Valley assumed that all would be for the best in a post-gatekeeper world. This was possible, of course, but there was no way to be certain. Already, social media-optimised content mills were outcompeting sober policy journals and threadbare alt-weeklies. Pulitzer prize-winning reporters, unable to earn a living wage, kept fleeing journalism for jobs in PR or social media marketing. Even an alarmist like myself didnt presume that the Spartzification of the entire media ecosystem would happen overnight. Could it happen within five years? Fifteen? I tried telling myself that I was indulging in slippery-slope thinking, but this did nothing to allay my fear that we were already slipping.

This is an edited extract from Antisocial: How Online Extremists Broke America, by Andrew Marantz, published by Picador on 20 Feb and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

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Continued here:
Big Swinging Brains and fashy trolls: how the world fell into a clickbait death spiral - The Guardian