When the Shoe Is On the Other Foot

 

So a mob invaded the capitol building last week. That was interesting. Here’s what I find more interesting: the accusations of hypocrisy flying in every direction right now.  I find them interesting because I have a heuristic that I try to employ whenever something drastic happens to someone on one side of an issue. Especially if it’s not a side I agree with.  That is, I try to imagine how I would feel if myself or someone I agreed with had the same thing happen to them.  With that in mind, let’s look at some of these accusations of hypocrisy.

Here we see a liberal ‘take down’ of concerns about Trump’s Twitter ban. The question this begs is: Are liberals now ok with private companies refusing service to those they disagree with?  Because last I checked, most were not.  In this particular instance, we who find Trump revolting and dangerous are very happy that a private company gave him the boot.  But my heuristic tells me to ask what would happen if Obama had been banned from Twitter?  This tweet feels like it’s ignoring a rather large issue for the sake of reveling in schadenfreude.  

As I’m writing this, the details about how and why security was so underwhelming on Jan 6th are still being investigated.  Personally, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that culturally, police predominantly are going to side with a politician who “stands for” Law and Order, and since the mob apparently sides with that politician, they are aligned on many issues.  But put in an extremely awkward position of having to oppose each other due to the context.  

This apparent symmetry that exists between rioting at BLM protests and now at the Capitol building is fertile ground for those who think they are centrists. The kind who find themselves very clever every time they intone the words "both sides" with the reverence of a liturgy. These smarty pants can see how ridiculous both sides are being. If only those sides would be reasonable, like them, what a balanced world we would live in! The irony I've discovered after my phase in that zone is that when you well-actually both sides you are de facto defending the conservative position. (just rejecting the very farthest right) You're haphazardly perpetuating whatever system you happen to find yourself in as being some kind of ideal worthy of defense. It's not clever. It's unreflective, following a simple algorithm that generates just-so narratives. There's a reason South Park has been able to return to that well hundreds of times over 20 years.

And I can’t imagine a scenario like this Capitol building riot happening if the mob was majority-black. Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination, but I sincerely don’t understand how any person who’s been paying attention this year could think that a black mob could storm and infiltrate the capitol building. They would all be dead.  And my god… I HOPE that deep down, everyone knows that. 

Here’s one I made.  Look how many shares it got. Why can’t stuff I share about my books get that much love? 

But anyway, the multiple times that police and security moved aside and ushered the screaming mob into the building has to MEAN something.  That CAN’T be normal.  https://mobile.twitter.com/m3mnoch/status/1346927478732857351

The most popular form of hypocrisy-accusations came from people who support BLM protests in the summer/fall of 2020 saying that conservatives are suddenly ok with violent riots. (This is not true; most are not)  And conservatives saying that BLM supporters have no right to criticize the mob that broke into the capitol building because BLM protests also had plenty of examples of property destruction, vandalism and violence.  I think on its face, the conservative argument is more valid.  However, upon scrutiny I believe it falls apart rather quickly.  And that has to do with the ostensible reason for the violent actions.

I’ve written plenty about my thoughts on Black Lives Matter, and I'll be getting into it later. For now I will simply summarize it like this. A large percentage of a minority group in my country has lived-experience of systemic oppression. You can agree or disagree with their experience, that’s up to you.  But let’s compare it with the violence that occured in the Capitol building. Many of the iconic leaders of the mob made no effort to disguise themselves, so we can see who they are and what they think on their social media.  Most of them believed in Qanon. From Wikipedia: “QAnon[a] (/ˌkjuːəˈnɒn/) is a disproven and discredited far-right conspiracy theory[2] alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic[3][4][5] pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against U.S. president Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal.[6] QAnon also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as the "Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested.[7][8]”

In other words, the NOT-lived experience of thinking that a crowd-sourced internet myth is real enough to incite them to capture and possibly kill politicians that they believe are secret blood-drinking satanists.  

To be clear: I am NOT saying that everyone in the mob believed this stuff, or that everyone in the protest outside did.  But there were a LOT of Q signs.  And confederate flags. And tshirts, hats, tattoos and merchandise that praised the holocaust, denied the holocaust, or otherwise marked these individuals as racists if not some flavor of literal nazi.  Again, this does not mean that everyone, or even the majority of people there, believe these things.  But the vanguard did; the ones literally smashing in windows and doors and then taking selfies inside.  Most of them absolutely did. I’m not cherry picking the fringe in order to make “all conservatives” look stupid.  The fringe picked itself when they bashed in the doors and stormed the capitol building. Which means it is very fair to draw a comparison between the grievances that the capitol building mob had, versus the grievances that the BLM rioters had. Here, in his own words, explaining his concerns, is one of the leaders of the mob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22d6tRXxVeg  

In both the BLM and Capitol building riots there were certainly, mathematically by necessity, some portion of chaos tourists.  People who just want to be in on the action and break shit.  And a riot is a fantastic opportunity to do so with impunity.  I think it’s fair to cross them out of the tally for both of these instances.  However, in both cases you absolutely had some amount of very sincerely upset people propelled by ideas to do violence.  And it would not be fair to criticize one of these events and not the other.  My point is that you can’t stop at the surface level and ‘call it even’.  Or call the other side hypocritical for not denouncing the BLM rioters while denouncing the Capitol building rioters. Because reasons and motivations matter.  Even if it is as so many conservatives believe, and there is no such thing as systemic racism; there’s still the issue that a large portion of a minority group in our country experiences SOMETHING.  Unless you think they are all literally making it up because they want free stuff, in which case, ok, you’re just a racist and I don’t feel the need to communicate any further with you. 

So again, we all recognize that if one of these theories is correct, then drastic action is warranted.  If it is true that satanic pedophiles truly do control the Democrat party and stole the election from a righteous man who is saving children from them… then hell yeah, you should storm the capitol and stop the evil! Likewise, if you have been systematically oppressed, live in fear for your life from the institutions that are supposed to protect you, and every claim you make about it is ignored by the institutions that need to change, then hell yeah, you should make people pay attention to you!  And historically, the only way enough sustained attention is paid to an issue… has been rioting. Here are a few short perspectives on the topic. https://time.com/3951282/riot-violence-use-american-history/ 

I don’t like rioting. It is not pleasant. They almost always result in injury and often lead to deaths. Not a good thing.  Not the preferred method for achieving one’s goals. But sometimes it is still warranted when the preferred methods have failed. (As are many forms of violence)  It’s not fair for the families and businesses in the area.  It’s also impossible to weigh in the balance of justice which bad thing is more unfair.  The damage to property and wealth of corporations, and the lifetime of work and investment of small business owners lost, vs. the generations of oppression a people experience.  I can’t calculate that. I don’t experience the oppression that so many people of color report.  I can look at statistics.  But I know how easy it is to manipulate statistics.  I can watch the horrific videos of people of color being seemingly maliciously or callously murdered by police.  But I know that video from one perspective only tells a small slice of reality, and that I’m missing too much context to be able to make a perfectly Bayesian adjudication of the event. I also know that high-salience material like these videos can cause a distorting effect in the mind where the extremity makes me assume that there’s more of it than there really is.  I can hear countless testimony from people of color -some of whom I know personally, some of whom are my siblings- who tell some really depressing anecdotes about their experiences with racism, both personal and systemic.  But I know that the premises we bring to situations can have a huge impact on how we interpret ambiguous data.  Was that side-eye I got from the waiter because they don’t trust me, or just because they were checking if they forgot to bus the table behind me?  If I’m primed to see racism behind every bush, I could understand how I might accidentally tally up many non-racist things as racist. 

I know this behind-every-bush phenomenon from two experiences. The first example is from most of my childhood. I have a non verbal autistic sister who does not blend in.  When we were kids on family outings this was often a great embarrassment to me, but more often it aroused righteous indignation. I’d see the glances, pointing, murmured words, stifled laughter, etc from people around us. And I would GLAAAARE at them. I wanted these people to know how disgusting they were. In retrospect I can’t tell you what percentage of those people deserved my ire and who were not even noticing Lucinda, but just happened to be chuckling about something else, or maybe stifling a sneeze.  Who knows?  How much of my anger was a projection of my own embarrassment?  It seems highly unlikely to me that NONE of these experiences were real. After all, I was there when she stripped naked and ran through the park stealing hot dogs off of peoples bbqs.  I was there when she used one of the display toilets at the hardware store.  OF COURSE she got looks and stares and chuckles and many a stink-eye.  So was this oppression-by-proxy a real legitimate social hardship I had to deal with? A bit. I don’t think Lucinda noticed or cared, but if she did, it would obviously be a million times worse for her. And I would certainly not be in a position to tell her how right or wrong she is about that experience.  

This second example, I’m convinced was all in my head. This was a period of my life when I believed that literal demons could possess artifacts. (especially from foreign non-christian countries) I could FEEL oppressive atmospheres in stores that sold “New Age” music and beach shops that sold crystals and jewelry from ‘exotic lands’.  On my first honeymoon, both my wife and I were convinced there was a demon in the closet in the room we were staying in because we saw a red light that seemed to have no source.  Granted, we were both 18-year-old idiots.  And I do NOT want to make it seem like I’m drawing a comparison of my teen-aged superstition to a person of color’s experiences of racism.  I only want to highlight that ‘priming’ is a real psychological phenomenon, and I can’t dismiss the idea that systemic racism could conceivably be chalked up to it. I’m saying this because this is a serious idea that many smart conservatives hold.  Including plenty of black conservative thinkers.  And it needs to be addressed directly.   

So IF all these cognitive biases (Priming, Availability Heuristic, Salience Bias, etc) and logical fallacies (statistics, cherry picking, etc.) are at the root of the BLM movement, then it is true that the rioting that takes place at many of the protests are truly a massive injustice. Those riots ought to be denounced. 

IF. 

If the claims are merely flimsy excuses.  Here’s the reason I stopped being conservative on this matter.  That ‘IF’ us white people need to decide on when we cast our lot for or against people with darker skin in this country who DO feel that systemic racism is real… in order to answer that IF in the negative; that is to say: “No, you black people are imagining this. Calm down. Just follow the law and you’ll be fine. Work hard, study hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Something about grit. Something about respect. Etc.” In order to say these things, you have to put yourself as a judge of their lives.  You see reality.  They see a fantasy.  You proclaim yourself an expert about another person’s LIFE. (Not what I do when I decide a Qanon believer is seeing a fantasy.)  It was when I realized that I was pretending to be an authority about someone else’s LIFE,  that I stopped being a conservative on this issue.  It was then that I realized I really needed to listen.  And not just to the minority-of-the-minority who agreed with what I already thought.  (And boy there sure is a cottage industry for those folks.) I felt convicted (in a spiritual sense) of arrogance.  I can hold these two possibilities simultaneously: 1. The claims of BLM could be wrong. 2. I’m not the person who can adjudicate those claims.  I can do my best to research and sort through the data, the interpretations, the countless think-pieces like this one.  But I’m only one person with one perspective.  And it just so happens to be about the worst perspective to adjudicate the claims of BLM.  

This is not the same thing as saying that truth is relative or that a white person’s truth is different from a black person’s truth.  It is saying that experience matters.  That it is fundamentally dehumanizing to tell a person that their experience and interpretation is wrong, and you know better. It is arrogant to decide that I’ve read enough politics and history and sociology, and therefore I know that the claims of countless black Americans are wrong.  

Likewise, it follows that I do not mean that any particular individual of any color or perspective is 100% correct.  A black person is not more likely than me to know any random fact of the universe.  But they ARE more likely than me to know more about life for black people in America.

There is a reality that we are all a part of, and none of us are completely correct about it. But for me to actively oppose the work -both inside and outside institutions composed of people who claim injustice- would require a much higher standard of evidence against them for me to be comfortable denouncing them.  

Which brings us back to Qanon.  Here we have a group of people who do NOT have personal experience with satanic blood-drinking pedophiles.  But they DO have lots of memes and youtube videos and conspiracy forums. They claim they are oppressed. The truth they try to propagate is being suppressed by the satanic cabal that runs Hollywood, tech, the media and the government. (Except Trump, the police and probably the military? I guess?)  This satanic cabal has stolen the election. Trump told them so.  He didn’t need to say the part about the satanic cabal; that part was already pre-filled in for him like a Mad Lib. He told them to come and be strong. That it would be wild. That the people had to take it back. And completely unsurprisingly, some fringe of those who were moved by his words took it to the level of a violent riot complete with multiple plots involving bombs, nooses and kidnapping paraphernalia.   

So just as with BLM, we have an aggrieved minority group. (Minority in belief, still predominantly white and mostly male) They have a claim about the oppression that they need to stop with violence if necessary.  They have a riot. 

Am I a hypocrite for denouncing them because the quality of the evidence for their beliefs is less robust (by a country mile) than that of BLM? This is what I’d like all conservatives who are currently calling BLM supporters hypocrites to ask themselves.