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Opinion | America Loves Plausible Deniability

America Loves Plausible Deniability
Lindy WestOCT. 14, 2017
15West-superJumbo.jpg

Milo Yiannopoulos leaving a news conference in February. Lucas Jackson/Reuters
In the end, which is where we live now, it turns out that America was brought low not by war or economic collapse or environmental catastrophe (though none of those are off the table) but by plausible deniability.

This month, BuzzFeed News published a truly astonishing exposé on the so-called alt-right, the youth-driven, arch-conservative online movement that is at least partly responsible for Donald Trump’s rise to power and has been an indispensable siege engine in his war on truth. An unnamed entity sent BuzzFeed a cache of emails from the former Breitbart editor and alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos — Steve Bannon’s protégé — revealing that Yiannopoulos has been working intimately with white nationalist leaders to normalize radical far-right ideology, particularly among disaffected white youth.

In a bizarre personal twist, one of the leaked emails exposed a connection between Yiannopoulos and an ostensibly feminist writer named Mitchell Sunderland, then employed at Broadly, Vice Media’s women’s section. “Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos, with a link to one of my articles. That email corroborated two things that feminist writers have been insisting, fruitlessly, for years: One, that the abuse we endure daily on social media isn’t just a byproduct of the internet but a politically motivated silencing campaign. And two, that even left-wing media failed to take us seriously when we insisted that Yiannopoulos was more than just a clown.

The alt-right has always thrived on obfuscation and disinformation. A few of its founding factions include a misogynist hate movement that insists it’s a good-faith crusade for journalistic ethics and free speech, multiple white supremacist hate movements that insist they’re simply passionate about “Western culture,” and the disfigured (or perhaps unmasked) remains of the Republican Party, which has long hidden its ruthless determination to enrich the richest at the expense of the poorest behind lies about “small government” and “personal responsibility.”

How did such a conglomerate of transparent bigots (transparent by any honest reckoning, at least) achieve enough mainstream credibility to win the White House? Well, because they said, over and over, that they weren’t bigots — the “nu-uh” defense.

The alt-right insisted it was not racist even as its swastika-clad minions marched on Charlottesville, Va., and its president relentlessly demonized Muslims and Mexican immigrants and trafficked in vile stereotypes about the lives of black Americans. The alt-right insisted it was not sexist even as its online foot soldiers harassed feminist writers into hiding and its president bragged about committing sexual assault. Plausible deniability was the alt-right’s Trojan horse, and the media ate it up, running puff pieces that cast Yiannopoulos as an outrageous cad and interviewing neo-Nazis to get “their side” of the story.

The BuzzFeed emails lay waste to it all. There is no longer any remotely justifiable reason to suggest that Milo Yiannopoulos’s popularity among neo-Nazis could merely be a coincidence or, by extension, that white male supremacy is not the defining principle of Trumpism. Yiannopoulos, working under the orders of the man who would become the president’s chief strategist, was soliciting ideological guidance from overt white supremacists including Andrew Auernheimer, known as Weev, of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Yiannopoulos’s contacts also advised him on how to more effectively mask his propaganda — to delight and whip up his base without alienating the center.

None of this is new, of course, except for the scale of it. Trump sailed into the political sphere in 2011 on a gale of dog whistles, exploiting American anti-black hostility without ever quite calling Barack Obama a racial slur. He just wasn’t sure about Obama’s citizenship, he said. He just wanted proof, he said, and didn’t the American people deserve it?

Of course, to anyone with even the remotest grasp of nuance, context, American history or good faith, Trump’s racism has always been glaring, as has Yiannopoulos’s. But as long as Trump insists, again and again, that he’s the “least racist person,” that’s plausible deniability enough for millions of Americans.

When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for 400 years.

White Americans hunger for plausible deniability and swaddle in it and always have — for the sublime relief of deferred responsibility, the soft violence of willful ignorance, the barbaric fiction of rugged individualism. The worst among us have deployed it to seduce and herd the vast, complacent center: It’s O.K. You didn’t do anything wrong. You earned everything you have. Benefiting from genocide is fine if it was a long time ago.

We have to kick this addiction if we’re going to save our country.

In August 2016, a “Nightline” producer asked if I’d be willing to appear in a segment about internet trolling alongside Yiannopoulos, and I reluctantly agreed, on the condition that I could discuss online harassment’s dire political ramifications. “Milo and his followers are defending the status quo,” I wrote in an email. “They are explicitly attacking women and people of color in order to squash social justice movements. They are anti-Semitic, transphobic, misogynist white supremacists, no matter how much Milo couches it in his naughty scoundrel schtick.”

When the piece aired, the text under my face — the chyron — read “Trolling Victim.” (They said they later changed it, after my strenuous objections.) All political analysis was cut in favor of a cursory description of bad things trolls have said to me. Just like all the other “trolling victims,” I was a spectacle, lurid entertainment for the masses as much as I’d been lurid entertainment for the trolls.

In Trump’s America, we all have that chyron.






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