When Online Narratives and Offline Reality Collide
Life experiences can sometimes be a turning point for those who have been misled by far-right news and misinformation bubbles. Two recent news stories illustrate this point.
First, Courtney Gore, a co-host of a right-wing talk show, was elected to the school board in her small Texas town after she promised to root out the left-wing indoctrination that, she was told, was happening in their school system. But after getting elected and searching for the indoctrination, she discovered it was all a hoax. She was misled into believing something that wasn't true.
The Texas Tribune reports,
But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.
The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”
Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”
Second, Lauren Southern was a very online "tradwife" influencer, but after getting married to live the life she had been preaching, she experienced right-wing toxicity first hand.
Unheard reports,
For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.
What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.
...
It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.
It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.
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AVC on the Pillar Seminary Podcast
I was on the Pillar Seminary podcast recently to talk about fighting misinformation and the work of AVC. Watch it below or on your podcast app.
What Else We're Reading
RNS: “How Trumpism has pushed a fringe charismatic theology into the mainstream”
This NAR movement runs like a golden thread through recent flashpoints of evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump, Christian nationalism and Christian extremism. NAR leaders were central to the mobilization of Christians for the Jan. 6 insurrection, and many apostles, prophets and NAR symbols were present around the U.S. Capitol that day. NAR ideas helped inspire the recent controversy surrounding the Alabama Supreme Court in vitro fertilization ruling. House Speaker Mike Johnson flies a flag outside his office that is closely associated with the NAR’s aggressive prophetic politics.
The reasonable objector may argue that all of those things might be true, and yet the NAR could still be a fringe movement. How much influence do NAR ideas have on broader American evangelicalism?
It’s true that the NAR networks come from the amorphous nondenominational, charismatic sector of American evangelicalism that seeks to restore the supernatural dimensions of early Christianity. Historically these groups have been outside the evangelical mainstream.
But we have collected data showing just how far these NAR-associated beliefs and practices have spread within American evangelical communities. The present-day reach and influence of these ideas may be shocking to those acquainted with conventional evangelicalism. Charismatic theologies, NAR prophecies and radical politics that once operated on the margins of evangelicalism have moved to the center of the action. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this transformation has a lot to do with Donald Trump.
The Atlantic: “THE NEW PROPAGANDA WAR: Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.”
Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.
Reuters: “Trump blasts his trial judges. Then his fans call for violence.”
The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.
Experts on extremism say the constant repetition of threatening or menacing language can normalize the idea of violence – and increase the risk of someone carrying it out. Mitch Silber, a former New York City Police Department director of intelligence analysis, compared the Trump supporters now calling for violence against judges to the U.S. Capitol rioters who believed they were following Trump’s “marching orders” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“This is just the 2023-2024 iteration of that phenomenon,” Silber said. “Articulating these ideas is the first step along the pathway of mobilizing to violence.”
AP: “New Builders initiative looks to fight polarization by encouraging collaboration and alliances”
That coalition -- which includes entrepreneur and philanthropist Daniel Lubetzky, actor Liev Schreiber, journalist Katie Couric, director of the Muhammad Ali Center Lonnie Ali, and others – announced Tuesday that it would launch Builders, a nonprofit global initiative aimed at reducing polarization while encouraging people to work together to find solutions they can all support.
“The problem is the way social media and cable news are turning everything into ‘us versus them’ situations,” said Lubetzky, founder of Kind Snacks and recurring shark on ABC’s “Shark Tank.” “Builders will counteract that by providing people help on how to strengthen their thinking, how to process information, and how they can actually solve problems rather than create animosity.”
BBC: “The 'Sift' strategy: A four-step method for spotting misinformation”
When it comes to not falling for misinformation, being aware of our human fallibilities, such as our quickness to believe what we want to believe, is a good first step. Research shows that even being more reflective in general can "inoculate" us against believing fake news.
But it's not the only thing that we can do. In particular, researchers have found there are several simple, concrete strategies that we all can (and should) use, especially before we're tempted to share or repeat a claim, to verify its accuracy first.
One of my favourites comes with a nifty acronym: the Sift method. Pioneered by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, it breaks down into four easy-to-remember steps.
PsyPost: “Perceived lack of recognition drives Trump support among historically dominant groups, study suggests”
“I was surprised that my results generalized so well across three very different majority groups – white people, men, and Christians. This suggests that my theory taps into a more general phenomenon that generalizes to the identities of other majority groups and possibly also other countries,” Versteegen told PsyPost.
“Trump voters are not socially marginalized – they feel they firmly belong to U.S. society. However, many of them feel disrespected as white people, men, and Christians – which is surprising given that these groups still enjoy many privileges in the United States. Individuals who report this combination –– feeling firm belonging to U.S. society while feeling disrespected with their subgroup background –– are more likely to vote for and sympathize with Donald Trump.”
MDA is Half-Off for May!
Have you watched your church become divided in recent years? Friends and family torn apart by culture wars, politics, or pandemic policies? You're not alone. We've heard similar stories over and over again. This is why American Values Coalition has created a resource to help churches with some of the major drivers of division.
Mending Division Academy (MDA) is a set of six courses for church small groups. They are titled:
When Polarization Divides Us: Confronting the Perception Gap
When Conspiracies Divide Us: Confronting Misinformation
When Social Media Divides Us: Confronting Our Internet Habits
When Journalism Divides Us: Confronting Our Media Consumption Habits
When Politics Divides Us: Confronting Political Idolatry
When Crises of Faith Divide Us: Confronting Deconstruction
Each course offers 3-5 sessions. For each session a small group will watch a 30-40 minute video together and process the information together with provided discussion questions.
Use the code MAY50 to get half-off each course for the month of May.
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This has been a VERY informative piece of work, Napp. I have been learning about the NAR for quite some time now, and this has added a whole new layer of information, which has filled in a lot of the gaps in my understanding. I have two different people in my life who have gone down the NAR rabbit hole and believe with all their heart that it is, God’s will. So sad!!
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