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State system chancellor backs Kutztown University's reopening plan, urges tempering of discourse The Mercury
A number of cartoons by De Cinzo had been posted on the Trail Now website and have since been removed. One of these cartoons was re-used in a video from a local candidate who has since removed it and sincerely apologized.
There is no room in our public forum for offensive discourse, whether it be by cartoon or any other type of communication. Whether consciously or unconsciously, De Cinzo employs dangerous and unacceptable anti-Semitic tropes against a political candidate, depicting him hunched over with an enlarged nose and carrying bags of money. One only needs to search “anti-Semitic cartoons” to see scores of similar depictions used by the Nazis.
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State system chancellor backs Kutztown University's reopening plan, urges tempering of discourse Boyertown Berk Montgomery Newspapers[unable to retrieve full-text content]
State system chancellor backs Kutztown University's reopening plan, urges tempering of discourse Reading EagleMany of my oldest friends are voting for President Trump on Tuesday.
They’re supporting Trump despite the arguments my pundit colleagues and I have been making — or perhaps because of them. My pro-Trump friends and readers complain that the mainstream media are biased against Trump, and thus they tune us out for being unfair and piling on.
“The picture painted by the media is a caricature of the person,” said my high school buddy Dave Richardson, who voted for Trump warily in 2016 but is supporting him enthusiastically this time.
The conundrum for those of us trying to change minds is that the more urgently we shout, the less we’re heard. “We’re not stupid, gullible sheep,” one reader, Frank J., complained. “Be fair and balanced in your reporting and it would have more power.”
My childhood friend Mary Mayor likewise supported Trump and is turned off by coverage that she regards as hostile. “I’ve never known a president who has gone through so much scrutiny, overlooking all the positives he has done,” she told me.
I understand why people like Mary voted for Trump. The loss of well-paying jobs devastated places like my hometown, Yamhill, Ore. Mary spent seven years homeless, lost four relatives to suicide, and herself once put a gun to her own head, before she pulled herself together with the help of a local church. Trump talked about bringing jobs back and helping ordinary workers — so she voted for the first time in her life, for Trump.
“We hoped Trump would help boost the economy and jobs,” my old friend Jani Sitton said, explaining her vote for Trump in 2016.
The challenge for opponents of Trump like myself is that our denunciations of the president sometimes backfire and help him, just as polls suggest that impeachment increased support for him (Gallup shows him with his highest presidential approval numbers after being impeached). As Jani said: “The condescension from very loud and aggressive Trump critics has contributed big time toward conservatives feeling sympathy for him.”
So in my last column before Election Day, let me explain as respectfully as I can why I’m so worked up about this election.
It’s partly because I believe that Trump is a charlatan who preys on my friends who trust him. Trump’s own sister has said he is a liar with “no principles,” and his former chief of staff Gen. John Kelly reportedly referred to him as “the most flawed person” he has known.
So if I’m passionate, it’s because I feel he has exploited my friends and then betrayed them with his policies.
How can a president be called “pro-life” when he has presided over the deaths of more than 225,000 Americans from Covid-19 and still doesn’t have a strategy to fight it? Trump is also working to take away health insurance from my friends: Already, the number of Americans with health insurance has dropped by 5.2 million since Trump took office, and he is trying to completely overturn the Affordable Care Act right after the election.
I’m a great believer in community, in the idea that what makes countries strong is “social capital” — the web of relationships, beliefs, trust, decency and identity that make a society work. Trump has taken this social fabric and acted as the Great Unraveler.
He replaces accepted facts with lies, baseless accusations, support for QAnon and even a conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama had SEAL Team 6 killed instead of Osama bin Laden. In both supporters and opponents, Trump nurtures hate. He is what Proverbs 6:19 calls “a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”
Trump has been a corrosive acid on America’s social capital. He has cost us trust. He has dissolved our connectivity.
I understand now why kindergarten teachers sometimes want to remove a loudmouth bully who disrupts the class and leaves it dysfunctional. That is what Trump has done to our democracy.
For much of my career, I’ve written about national security, from Afghanistan to North Korea, China to Iran. But great nations more often rot from within than suffer defeat from outside, and Trump is exacerbating longstanding divisions and weaknesses in this country.
So to those who think I suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” let me explain — with respect, but also urgency — that my intensity arises because I see Trump as not just a phony but also a threat. He has left the United States a more turbulent and divided nation, one close to war with itself.
Today the greatest threat I perceive to America’s national security isn’t from Qaeda terrorists, Russian cyberattacks or Chinese missiles. As I see it, it’s from Trump’s re-election.
This is when conversations with friends become awkward. I may think that Trump bamboozled my pals, and they may think I’m manipulated by leftist propaganda, but we all have agency — and we each think the other is using that agency to endanger a country we all love.
I doubt I’ll change many minds. But the only thing I can do is reach out in a good-faith effort to undecided voters.
Sometimes it works. Jani, a committed Christian, has worried about Democrats and abortion. But this time she will vote for Biden because she’s appalled at Trump’s policies toward migrants, Black Lives Matter and health care, and because “God cares about oppression, justice, the voiceless.”
As Jani goes, so, I hope, will the nation.
Spot illustration by Chloe Scheffe
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For weeks now, there has been a steady drumbeat of warnings — from former government officials, academics, legal experts and journalists — about the chaos and hijacking of democracy that could occur in the election’s aftermath. It turns out those alarm bells are being rung inside the Trump administration as well.
This morning we published an opinion essay by Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has covered national security and the presidency for more than three decades, on what could happen in the hours and days after the polls close Tuesday. He takes us into Donald Trump’s White House, where top officials he spoke with “are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit.”
Ron’s essay is based on conversations he had with some two dozen current and former aides to President Trump. “The central sources in this story are or were senior officials, mainly in jobs that require Senate confirmation,” Ron writes. “They have had regular access to the president and to briefings at the highest level.” Though his sources are known to me, we have agreed to grant these men and women anonymity for the purposes of Ron’s Op-Ed.
That’s never an easy call to make, especially when so many other officials have attached their names to critiques of the White House. Readers may see asking for anonymity as a way to make personal attacks without consequence, a means for reputation laundering or even a sign of cowardice.
We worried about these things, too. Generations of journalists who work for The Times’s newsroom and Opinion have made promises to sources about the confidentiality of their identities, a practice that is used on occasion and with oversight from editors and managers. “Sources often fear for their jobs or business relationships — sometimes even for their safety,” as our standards editor, Phillip Corbett, wrote in this 2018 explainer.
We rarely use anonymous sourcing in our opinion pages, but when we do, it is only after thoughtful consideration of the value of the information that would otherwise be lost to our audience. Given the importance of showing that even the people whom the president has chosen as some of his closest advisers are worried about how the election will unfold, we decided that Ron’s reporting rose far above that bar.
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Rumble Debate creates a new way of opening a dialogue between two people with opposing views on various issues and current events. Available now on App Store for iPhone!
CHICAGO (PRWEB) October 29, 2020
Tired of seeing overly political social media posts with no real discussion behind them?
We are too, hence Rumble Debate. We aim to create a new way of opening a dialogue between two people with opposing views on various issues and current events. We hope to do this by launching this debate focused app on iPhone and iOS devices.
The app is easy to use
Users are then prompted to discuss why they selected their position and debate their conflicting ideas. At the conclusion of the bout, users are then prompted to rank their opponent. The best performers will be listed on our top-ranked Rumblers page!
Rumble LLC creates one on one conversations with no outside influences while allowing users to be as anonymous as they want to be so they can be free of judgment from their peers.
Traditional social media can be a great way to keep in touch with friends and stay informed on news and current events, but it's probably not the best place for civil discourse. That's where Rumble Debate can help to fill the gap.
"We wanted to create a better outlet for people who express their political opinions on social media sites, and almost more importantly an outlet for those people who don't think social media is the correct platform for that type of discourse," said founder Alex Leventis
We chose the name Rumble Debate and the logo of the boxing glove to model the symbolism of a boxing match. We understand that discussing politics can get contentious, but like boxing, there is always some mutual respect and admiration by the fighters at the conclusion of the bout. That's what we hope to replicate here.
As described in The Social Dilemma, many people fall into the trap of social media echo chambers where all they hear is one side of the argument. Rumble Debate hopes to correct this as our ultimate goal is to give our users a further understanding of different issues affecting today's world. We hope to do this by exposing them to different people with different opinions.
Choose a topic. Pick a stance. Rumble.
Available on app Store for iPhone!
For the original version on PRWeb visit: https://www.prweb.com/releases/rumble_debate_iphone_app_launches_to_provide_a_space_for_discourse_discussion_and_conversation_on_the_heels_of_a_contentious_election/prweb17502214.htm
For a variety of reasons 2020 has been stressful, frightening, and just plain exhausting. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, some of us have lost loved ones. Many are working from home, and others are unemployed. Wildfires ravaged the west coast as hurricanes and tornadoes battered the Southeast. Protests against racism and police brutality were held around the globe.
And, of course, there is next week's election, which in some cases has pitted relatives and friends against each other.
At times it seems impossible to talk about politics and current events without ending in a shouting match and hurt feelings. Is it possible to have a civil discussion with someone who doesn't share the same views?
"A need to focus on being right often leads to missed opportunities to understand one another," said Tiffiny Hughes-Troutman, licensed psychologist and director of the Center for Assessment, Referral, and Education (CARE) at Georgia Tech. "Seeking to understand another's viewpoint does not equate with agreeing with them; it promotes psychological flexibility and a growth mindset."
Psychological flexibility means recognizing and adapting to various situational demands, and being proactive instead of reactive in acknowledging and owning one's response.
"It is natural to want to assert our own beliefs, but also very healthy to accept that someone else may hold a different opinion despite your efforts to change them," Hughes-Troutman said.
Sonia Alvarez-Robinson, executive director of Georgia Tech Strategic Consulting, agrees.
"This time of disagreement and discourse is challenging all of us," she said. "But we need to keep our focus on what unites us at Georgia Tech—our common mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. Regardless of the outcome of the election, our mission remains solid. No matter which candidate we support, vote for, or agree with, our students are our first priority and we need to keep that front and center."
Alvarez-Robinson said vigorous disagreement with another person can often feel like an adverse event, and if prolonged it becomes a chronic stressor.
"We often have physiological responses to being in conflict with another person—our heart rate goes up, we might have pain in our gut, we might have skin irritations, or even have trouble breathing. These are all signs of stress and distress," she said.
Stressors caused by conflict can also have a negative impact on personal and professional relationships.
"Research has shown that diversity brings richness, new ideas, insights, and growth that does not happen in a homogeneous group," said Alvarez-Robinson, who has a doctorate in human and organizational behavior. "Yet studies have also shown that diversity of values, especially when they are deeply rooted, can make productivity and group efficacy more difficult."
Alvarez-Robinson is the principal empowerment officer of Tech's Resilience Employee Resource Group. She suggests using resilience as a skill to help grow from the difficulties experienced through discourse. "Resilience can help groups manage diversity of values while also healing from hurt that is created when people become emotionally charged in their disagreements."
Alvarez-Robinson suggests employing the following coping strategies during this stressful time:
Hughes-Troutman added, "It is essential to acknowledge our feelings and aim for a balanced and healthy perspective to prevent stress levels from escalating."
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Citation: Can we get along? Resilience can help promote civil discourse (2020, October 29) retrieved 29 October 2020 from https://ift.tt/3oCq30C
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It’s always assumed that those of us who felt certain of Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016 were putting too much trust in polls.
I was putting too much trust in Americans.
I’d seen us err. I’d watched us stray. Still I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump.
We had episodes of ugliness, but this? No way. We were better than Trump.
Except, it turned out, we weren’t.
Never mind that the Russians gave him a boost. Or that he lost the popular vote. Some 46 percent of the Americans who cast ballots for president in 2016 picked him, and as he moved into the White House and proceeded to soil it, most of those Americans stood by him solidly enough that Republicans in Congress didn’t dare to cross him and in fact went to great, conscience-immolating lengths to prop him up. These lawmakers weren’t swooning for a demagogue. They were reading the populace.
And it was a populace I didn’t recognize, or at least didn’t want to.
What has Trump’s presidency taken from us? I’m reasonably sure that many Americans feel the same loss that I do, and I’m struggling to assign just one word to it.
Innocence? Optimism? Faith? Go to the place on the Venn diagram where those states of mind overlap. That’s the piece of me now missing when I look at this beloved country of mine.
Trump snuffed out my confidence, flickering but real, that we could go only so low and forgive only so much. With him we went lower — or at least a damningly large percentage of us did. In him we forgave florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, the disparagement of invaluable institutions, the degradation of essential democratic traditions.
He played Russian roulette with Americans’ lives. He played Russian roulette with his own aides’ lives. In a sane and civil country, of the kind I long thought I lived in, his favorability ratings would have fallen to negative integers, a mathematical impossibility but a moral imperative. In this one, they never changed all that much.
Polls from mid-October showed that about 44 percent of voters approved of Trump’s job performance — and this was after he’d concealed aspects of his coronavirus infection from the public, shrugged off the larger meaning of it, established the White House as its own superspreader environment and cavalierly marched on.
Forty-four percent. Who in God’s name are we?
I’m not forgetting pre-Trump American history. I’m not erasing hundreds of years of slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, the many kinds of discrimination that have flourished in my own lifetime, all the elections in which we Americans made stupid choices and all the presidents who did “un-American” things. We’re a grossly imperfect country, our behavior at frequent odds with our ideals.
But for every abomination, I could name a moment of grace. For many of our sins, stabs at atonement. We demonstrated a yearning to correct our mistakes and, I think, a tropism toward goodness. On balance we were open, generous. When I traveled abroad, people from other countries routinely complimented Americans for that. They experienced us as arrogant, but also as special.
Now they just pity us.
How much of this can we pin on Trump? Not as much as we try to. And oh, how we’ve tried. This obsession of the news media and his detractors with every last eccentricity and inanity isn’t just about keeping a complete record, I’ve come to realize. It’s also a deflection, an evasion: If he gets the whole of the stage, then Americans’ complicity and collaboration are shoved into the wings.
And the freakier we make him out to be, the less emblematic he is. The more he becomes a random, isolated event. We emphasized what a vanquishable opponent Hillary Clinton was because that diminished the significance of the vanquishing and the vanquisher. We spoke of a perfect storm of circumstances that led to his election as a way of disowning the weather.
We cheered on Robert Mueller’s investigation not just because it might hold Trump and his wretched accomplices to account but also because it might explain him away, proving that he reached the White House by cheating, not because he was what nearly half of the country decided that they wanted.
We tried to make him a one-and-done one-off. But deep into his presidency, when his execrable character had been fully exposed, his Fox News cheerleaders continued to draw huge audiences for their sycophantic panegyrics.
Trump himself continued to attract big crowds to his rallies, like the one in Greenville, N.C., in July 2019, when he pressed his attack on four Democratic congresswomen of color, including Representative Ilhan Omar, who immigrated from Somalia. Egged on by him, his audience chanted: “Send her back! Send her back!” He stopped speaking to give those words room, and he soaked them in.
Or what about the recent rally in Muskegon, Mich., where he freshly assailed the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, despite the fact that his obsessive denunciations of her had possibly been a factor in an alleged plot by 14 men to kidnap her? “Lock her up!” many of the attendees bellowed, to Trump’s obvious amusement.
Again, how has his approval rating not fallen to negative integers?
I’m not saying that support for him is spun entirely of malice or bias. Keen economic anxiety and profound political estrangement are why many voters turned to him, as my Times colleague Farah Stockman explained especially well in a recent editorial that was set in America’s disheartened heartland. “Even false hope,” she noted, “is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind.”
The headline on the article was “Why They Loved Him.” But why haven’t more of them stopped loving him? And how did so many Americans beyond that group fall so hard for him, thrilling to his recklessness, applauding his divisiveness, indulging his unscrupulousness? He tapped into more cynicism and nihilism than this land of boundless tomorrows was supposed to contain.
He tapped into more conspiratorialism, too. And I do mean “tapped.” Trump didn’t draw out anything that wasn’t already there, burbling beneath the surface.
He didn’t sire white supremacists. He didn’t script the dark fantasies of QAnon. He didn’t create all the Americans who rebelled against protective masks and mocked those who wore them, a selfish mind-set that helps explain our tragic lot. It just flourished under him.
And it will almost certainly survive him. The foul spirit of these past five years — I’m including his hateful campaign — has been both pervasive and strangely proud. That’s what makes it different. That’s what makes it so chilling.
I could be overreacting. Maybe, just ahead, there will be moments of grace, enough of them to redeem us. Maybe I’ll look up on or after Nov. 3 and see that Biden has won North Carolina, has won Michigan, has won every closely contested state and the presidency in a landslide. Maybe I’ll have to eat my words.
Please, my fellow Americans, feed me my words. I’d relish that meal.
Spot illustration by Chloe Scheffe
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Note: This letter is appearing online only.
I can’t help but make observations about how people are showing support for their chosen candidates, and what it says about them and their party.
Three times now, I have seen in our town, a very young-appearing girl holding up a sign saying “F*** Trump.” I have never seen an “F*** Biden” sign in our town.
Supporting this type of behavior, speaks volumes about her parents, her fellow associates and her political party.
Of course, we have freedom of speech. But is this really how Biden supporters want their political, philosophical and moral views represented? If so, enough said.
Jill Henderson
Thousand Oaks
If Amendment 2 on the Nov. 3 ballot is approved by Alabama voters, it could pave the way for an end to an office in Alabama with a history in the U.S. that dates back to the 17th century, according to the Alabama Constable Association.
Chauncey Wood III, president of the Alabama Constables Association, reached by phone Monday, referred a reporter to a pending press release from the association. Jonathan Barbee, constable for Jefferson County and the association’s spokesman, said in the statement Monday that the association is concerned with several aspects of Amendment 2.
If approved, the amendment would process numerous changes to the state’s judicial system, including a change that would allow Alabama Supreme Court, rather than the chief justice, to appoint the administrative director of courts.
It would also increase the Judicial Inquiry Commission from nine members to 11 and would allow the governor, rather than the lieutenant governor, to appoint a member of the Court of the Judiciary. The amendment would also prevent automatic disqualification from holding public offices for a judge solely because a complaint was filed with the Judiciary Inquiry Commission. Additionally, it would provide that a judge can be removed from office only by the Court of the Judiciary.
Amendment 2 would also “delete certain language relating to the position of constable holding more than one state office,” and Barbee, in his statement, explained that the amendment could defund Constables statewide if counties chose to do so.
“Constables are not taxpayer-funded, they are largely voluntary Peace Officers,” Barbee said. “The fees they collect from their duties as Officers of the Courts allow them to support the expenses of the office such as vehicles, uniforms, and equipment. Amendment 2 also deletes the language protecting how Constables are paid by private court fees, leaving it in question for the appointed Administrator to decide.”
In Alabama, constables are elected peace officers and act in many of the same ways as do sheriff’s deputies. They’re able to make arrests, serve court papers and provide security for parades, funerals and the like.
Amendment 2 was sponsored by Alabama Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur. Orr, in a message to APR on Monday, said that the portion of the amendment dealing with constables was drafted by an Alabama Law Institute committee, headed at the time by the institute’s deputy director at the time, Clay Hornsby. Orr referred questions about the matter to Hornsby.
David Kimberley, acting deputy director of the Alabama Legislative Services Agency’s Law Institute, told APR that he took over as acting deputy director since Hornsby’s departure on Aug. 1.
If the amendment is approved by voters, Kimberley said that a county that wants to keep their constable can do so, but that the amendment is an acknowledgement that there are few constables left in the state and it’s approaching becoming “an archaic position or office.”
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“It was noted that only 24 out of the 67 counties currently have constables. Most of all the services of constables are duplicated sheriff’s deputies,” Kimberley said. “And it was essentially just an acknowledgement of what seemed to be a gradual phase out of this office in the state of Alabama.”
The Alabama Constables Association has joined other law enforcement and conservative groups in urging voters to vote “NO” on Amendment 2 in the general election on November 3rd.
Constable Jonathan Barbee, the Association’s Public Information Officer, said in a statement:
“We’re very concerned about several of the parts of Amendment 2, starting with the overall size and complexity of the Amendment. Typically, proposed constitutional amendments deal with only one or at most a few issues. Amendment 2 proposes SIX different changes to the State Judicial System, some of which drastically change the way we do things in Alabama.
“Amendment 2 could harm small communities by allowing county district courts to discontinue having municipal courts in cities with populations of less than 1,000. Municipal courts are typically held at night, making it easier for working people to attend. Without these small municipal courts, residents would have to spend most of a day at the county seat, losing a day of work or being forced to burn a vacation day for something that now is usually settled in an evening. It also indirectly attacks and defunds the Police departments of these towns, because their city courts are a significant source of revenue to help keep Officers on patrol. This part of Amendment 2 strikes at our small communities, drawing power to the larger county seats.
“Amendment 2 also removes the ability of the Legislature to impeach Judges, making the unelected, unaccountable to the people, Court of the Judiciary as the only body that can remove a Judge from the bench. Every citizen in Alabama should be concerned about this, because it effectively takes away their ability, acting through their elected representatives in the Legislature, to remove a bad Judge from their position.
“Amendment 2 allows Judges to continue working when complaints are filed against them with the Judicial Inquiry Commission. We understand that automatically removing a Judge just because a complaint has been filed can lead to problems and abuses of the system, but these can be settled in a timely manner by the JIC. The alternative, which Amendment 2 will create, would allow Judges who need to be removed to continue hearing cases, and give them a legal basis for fighting their removal. We believe this has the potential for much more serious problems to arise within our courts.
“Amendment 2 could also defund Constables by removing our ability to serve as Constables while also working in another position with the State or County. Constables are not taxpayer-funded, they are largely voluntary Peace Officers. The fees they collect from their duties as Officers of the Courts allow them to support the expenses of the office such as vehicles, uniforms, and equipment. Amendment 2 also deletes the language protecting how Constables are paid by private court fees, leaving it in question for the appointed Administrator to decide. This could effectively defund the Office of Constable statewide, which removes the protection and services Constables provide in their communities at no cost to the taxpayers of Alabama. Over the last year, at least two Constables were responsible for saving several lives during medical emergencies, Constables in Jefferson County have been helping with traffic control and schools, and one Constable assisted with a large drug interdiction arrest. We feel this is an unnecessary and unwarranted attack on the oldest elected law enforcement position in the nation.
“There are other problems with this Amendment. Amendment 2 mandates that the entire Alabama Supreme Court, instead of the Chief Justice, appoint the Administrative Director of Courts. It would be a change from having a single elected, accountable official being responsible for this appointment to having it done by committee. Once the Administrator is appointed they could, in fact, serve a lifetime appointment. Amendment #2 would also remove the ability of Alabama’s elected Lieutenant Governor to appoint one member of the Court of the Judiciary, giving that ability and more control to the Governor, who already appoints two members.
“Many of these points are not easy to find, because the forces behind this Amendment have purposefully omitted them from the official documentation provided to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. If for no other reason than this deliberate obfuscation of the true contents of this Amendment, it should be voted down. The people of Alabama deserve better than this attempt by special interests to radically change how our state’s Judicial system works, mostly as a smokescreen to hide how they will use it to protect bad Judges, inconvenience small-town residents, and make citizens across the state less safe.
“We urge the voters of Alabama to vote ‘NO’ on Amendment 2.”
Forum for Democracy (FvD) is a political party on the rise in the Netherlands. Thierry Baudet, FvD’s conservative revolutionary leader, positions himself and his party as right-wing and as an acceptable ideological alternative to all other Dutch parties. All media controversies about his radical-right ideology are labeled by Baudet as the work of opponents trying to frame him and the party in a negative way. A careful analysis of WhatsApp messages shared between the youth divisions of the party, however, shows a different reality, namely that mass media reporting helps shape a metapolitical discourse without deradicalizing the core ideology.
Thierry Baudet likes to use controversy to normalize his ideology. This strategy can be seen in his victory speech following the 2019 election and his review of Michel Houellebecq’s book “Sérotonine” for American Affairs. The two interventions were in essence about what he calls the decline of the boreal (or “Northern”) civilization and what Baudet sees as the devastating impact of the party cartel in particular and the individualization and atomization of society since 18th-century Enlightenment in general.
Such discourse is emblematic of Baudet’s ideological position. He regularly echoes anti-Enlightenment, conservative revolutionary and new right thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. All the classic tropes from these thinkers are present in his discourse: the decline of the nation, the demographic question, the loss of identity, traditional family and gender roles, and the devastating impact of globalization, liberalism and the French Revolution. And, as with any new right leader, he also loudly stresses the need for a national and civilizational rebirth.
Most notable, however, is that both his victory speech and his review became the object of intense media scrutiny. In Baudet’s victory speech, the use of the word “boreal” was read as an indication of his radical-right stance. In his review, it was the use of the word “suicide” in relation to abortion and his suggestion that women entering the workplace causes the decline of society that affirmed this profile. But despite all the classic ingredients of generic fascism being on full display, the Dutch media centered around some emblematic features without discussing the ideology that gives meaning to those excerpts.
This allowed Baudet to claim that the media was taking his words out of context and that it avoided the real debate on the issues that he was proposing. He constructed, as usual, the idea of an unfair witch hunt by fully exploiting the multilayered meanings attached to his words.
In light of this public debate, the discussions in the party WhatsApp groups are revealing. WhatsApp groups have become important tools for political parties and for populists in particular. The groups are used to share political messages among young FvD militants and even to suggest a direct line between Baudet and his sympathizers. The closed spaces of those groups not only enable so-called echo chambers, but they also facilitate more intimate conversations among party members and sympathizers as well as functioning as a teaching environment for new recruits.
As a result of the more informal and private nature of such groups, participants tend to lower their guard. Those conversations, when made public, can become highly explosive scandals. The FvD experienced this first-hand in April this year when a group of young party militants leaked a series of racist, radical-right memes and posts that were posted on the party’s official WhatsApp groups. They did this after their concerns remained unanswered by the leaders of the youth division and the party elite.
The whistleblowers categorized the communication in those groups as “expressions that correspond to authoritarian, fascist and/or National Socialist ideas, including anti-Semitism, homophobia and racist imperialism.” In short, the posts showed the integration of the members in the global new right culture. The media backlash was substantial, but the party, even though it called the discourse “disgusting,” refused to apologize.
This summer, the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant asked this author to analyze another 900 WhatsApp messages of the FvD’s youth divisions. Those new chats were collected after the media storm caused by the first leak and illustrate the impact of earlier leaks. Concretely, we see how members of the WhatsApp group act as if they are being watched by mainstream media like de Volkskrant or the NRC.
Moderators help members to imagine surveillance and to self-surveil. Party member Iem Al Biyati, for instance, explains how members should interact in the WhatsApp group: “Place yourself in the position of a journalist before you post edgy memes. You know very well how everything can be framed, so don’t open up that space.” In the literature, this is called imagined surveillance: moderators imagine “the scrutiny that could take place … and may engender future risks” for the party and act accordingly. As a result, a culture of (self-)surveillance is installed within the group chat. Not only the moderators but also regular members intervene when somebody posts something that can create bad optics.
Why is this important? The interventions and the non-interventions of moderators and members help us understand what the party and its members understand as acceptable discourse within both the party itself and society at large. It also allows us to understand the reception and appropriation of the discourse of the party elite by the militants and staffers. This is especially relevant when the party elite regularly claims to be misunderstood by the (left-wing) mass media and academia. And, lastly and maybe most importantly in the context of this article, it allows us to assess the impact of mass media hype on the discourse among party members.
Moderation policies in the WhatsApp group affect those topics that can connect the party to national socialism, Nazism and, in particular, anti-Semitism. Explicit anti-Semitism, explicit racism or incitement to violence are (sometimes) moderated. Any association with those topics has the potential to destroy the metapolitical construction of the party and push it out of the Overton window. Despite this surveillance culture, we see that members are still very explicit in their aversion toward LGBTQ+ people, migrants and migration, and the left. The analysis that Dutch identity has been emptied and is now filled with “transgenderism” in an attempt to destroy the nation passes without moderation. The framing of criminals as mainly “non-boreals” is not moderated, indicating that the controversy the media has created around Baudet’s use of the term didn’t succeed in harming the party.
A similar pattern is visible after mainstream media claimed that Baudet questioned the role of working women, as well as the availability of euthanasia and abortion in his review of Houellebecq’s book. Baudet himself claimed that his words were taken out of context, but in the WhatsApp group, the members, including the moderators, were enthusiastic, responding with “It was about time,” “nice!,” “he is just a great thinker, who thinks things through and puts them up for debate. Very well done! Proud of Cherry.” These takes were not only similar to what the mainstream media read in Baudet’s interventions, but in many cases, this back-facing discourse was far more radical than what Baudet explicitly stated or what the media made of it. Mainstream media reporting didn’t have an impact on the reception of Baudet’s words among peers.
Already in the 1990s, J.B. Thompson stressed that the study of ideology should not only look at the original text, but also at the transmission, construction, reception and appropriation of ideological discourse. From the FvD’s WhatsApp messages, we see how the party’s ideology is shaped in the interaction between the members of the WhatsApp group, the official party discourse and mass media reporting.
The moderation policies in the WhatsApp groups are partially informed by previous media attention. An earlier WhatsApp scandal created a surveillance culture that steers the militants away from damaging scandals. But this surveillance culture is rarely legitimized in terms of the party and its ideology. The need for self-surveillance is advocated to avoid what the journalists, in the words of another moderator, can use it to “frame” the party.
The imagined surveillance does not seem to affect the uptake of Baudet’s discourse by the militants and staffers in the WhatsApp groups. Mass media hypes that avoid tackling the larger ideology of the party contribute to the metapolitical character of the discourse. They help to establish a radical discourse that avoids explicit connotations with neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism and fascism. At the same time, we see that mass media reporting hardly affects the ideological core conviction of its members. With the exception of explicit or so-called “ironic” racism, anti-Semitism and references to Nazism, militants and moderators in the Young Forum for Democracy WhatsApp groups amplify Baudet’s discourse even when they think that they are being watched.
The word “boreal” has been used in over 100 WhatsApp messages. Baudet clearly has succeeded in introducing the term and establishing a strategic ambivalence concerning its meaning. The militants clearly understand the strategic potential of the ambivalent meaning, which now functions as an identity emblem in the group. It is clear that when media hypes fail to sketch the bigger ideological picture, the words and sentences that are extrapolated from of Thierry Baudet’s discourse become badges of honor because they have succeeded in triggering the outsiders without causing bad optics.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
As leaders of community-based organizations, many of which are members of the Silicon Valley Organization (SVO), we are appalled at the blatant racist fear-mongering tactics of SVO and SVO Political Action Committee (PAC), the California Association of Realtors (CAR) and the California Apartment Association (CAA).
Specifically, the SVO webpage (since removed due to our protests) depicting Black youth on a street surrounded by clouds of tear gas entitled “D-6 Do You Really Want to Sign on to This?” and a separate mailer that implies that a San Jose City Council candidate would eliminate single-family neighborhoods are right out of the playbook of real estate agents who have engaged in racist fear-mongering that created segregated neighborhoods throughout the past century.
The housing hit piece employs abhorrent tactics like showing large gray-scale residential “towers” next to cheerily-colored single-family homes — bringing to bear all the false and racist stereotypes about rental housing and more affordable housing as well as the individuals and families who live there. These kinds of racist tactics were highlighted in “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein (ironically, a book recently recommended by Matt Mahood, CEO of SVO, as well as by the National Association of Realtors).
While as nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations we do not take stances related to any particular candidate or political party, we can and do take a strong stance against racist actions and speak out when we see them. The mailer is false, misleading, and a racist action. The webpage goes deeper and reveals a disturbing pattern of racist tropes, e.g., darkening of an opposition candidate’s face in a previous race.
The involvement of SVO and its closely held SVO PAC, as well as close allies CAR and CAA, in these tactics implies that the membership of each of these organizations is supportive of them. As community-based and philanthropic organizations, as well as members of SVO, our staff and volunteers work hard every day to improve the lives of all of our residents, especially those who are affected most by systemic racism and poverty. We will no longer sit politely and allow the racist tropes, messages and policies of these organizations to continue.
We demand that SVO, CAR, and CAA retract the assertions and implications made in the mailer, apologize to your memberships, to the maligned candidate, and to the voters who are being misled. We likewise call on other SVO, CAR, and CAA members to denounce the mailer.
Finally, the inclusion of a blatantly racist webpage on the SVO website is shameful, inflammatory, and completely disrespectful to human dignity and to our diverse community. This is not the first or even the second offense from these organizations. These offenses cannot be dismissed as the fault of unsupervised contractors or consultants. This is a failure of executive leadership and oversight. A simple apology is insufficient. The executive staff and board leadership of SVO, SVO PAC, CAR, and CAA must resign immediately, and each of these organizations publicly cease encouraging or enabling this pattern of racist actions.
We encourage additional nonprofit and business members who are members of these organizations to join us in denouncing them and pulling your support. If we want to create a community that is anti-racist, we must start now. The day of reckoning is here.
Nicole Taylor is president & CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Teresa Alvarado is chief of local impact for SPUR. Gregory Kepferle is CEO of the Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County.
