3. Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds

You Are Here 3. Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds Ryan M. Milner, Whitney Phillips Published on: Apr 27, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) You Are Here 3. Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds The farmhouse sits left of center in the worn, gray image, dated about 1935.1 “This photograph shows an approaching dust storm in Morton County, Kansas,” the Kansas Historical Society caption reads, and does it ever.2 There are a few other objects in the frame, set back about a quarter mile: possibly a car or set of cars, possibly a shed or set of sheds, possibly a tree or set of trees. Otherwise, all that surrounds the house is dirt. Crumbling, dry, dirt on the ground, and darkening, billowing, dirt in the sky, a hundred feet up, maybe higher, like a mountain range roaring toward the farm. For the Morton County homesteader who worked that farm—and indeed for everyone in the Southern Plains region—this looming dust storm, and the other looming dust storms that plagued the Dust Bowl throughout the 1930s, must have felt like divine retribution. In some ways, it was. Rather than being purely natural phenomena, the storms were the result of terrible meteorological luck combined with social, political, and technological forces all colliding with the Great Depression.3 One of these forces was the influx in the 1920s of “suitcase farmers” lured West by the promise of easy money, then lulled by the yields of an unusually rainy decade. Very often these farmers knew very little, or cared very little, about sustainable agriculture; they just planted and planted and planted and harvested and harvested and harvested. Another prelude to disaster was the widespread adoption of mechanized farming, which allowed farmers to till massive swaths of native grasslands with unprecedented ease and speed. New tools plus a farming boom plus all that rain led to an overproduction of wheat, fueling an inevitable price drop. The less wheat was worth, the more wheat had to be produced to turn a profit. To meet that need, farmers tilled even harder, exposing even more soil to the winds. And then, just as the Great Depression had fully enveloped the region, the rain stopped. Not for one year, not for two. For ten. The plowed lands cracked and fell barren. Into the winds the dry dirt went. Houses filled with it. The sky filled with it. All there was was dirt. Heading into the 1930s, land conservationists knew full well that the “reckless and haphazard” farming practices of the 1920s, as Kansas representative Clifford Ragsdale Hope described them, were a catastrophe in the making.4 Convincing farmers to prevent the impending ecological disaster was a hard sell, however. For one thing, unless all farmers planted cover crop or roughened exposed soil, erosion relief efforts were of little use. No matter how well you maintained your fields, if your neighbor’s topsoil was loose, their dirt would blow onto your land—making you, suddenly, part of the problem. When strong winds blew, and they always blew, the result was 2 You Are Here 3. Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds devastating. Crops failed, farms collapsed, and people caught in the storm suffered a host of health problems, from long-term respiratory illness to death by suffocation. The Dust Bowl illustrates how profoundly human cultivation shapes the environment. Ecological cultivation and digital cultivation unfold, of course, in vastly different contexts. But in both cases, individual choices affect the entire ecosystem. Online, users with large platforms have a particularly deep footprint, but those with the smallest audiences also shape the landscape. Network climate change makes sure of it. Big pollution is pushed to small places, and small pollution is pushed to big places, sending gusts every which way. In some cases, pollution is introduced through willful destruction, the digital equivalent of someone razing massive plots of native grassland, fully aware of the consequences. In other cases, pollution results from inadvertent harms, the equivalent of learning how to grow crops but not learning how to manage soil. In our hyperconnected online ecosystem, even seemingly helpful actions can contaminate the environment, the equivalent of working the land as hard as you can so that you can grow extra food for your worse-off neighbors. The dust still flies, regardless. At the heart of this chapter are the dust storms of white supremacy, white nationalism, and broad-spectrum bigotry that, long accumulating in the soil, roared forth anew during the 2016 US presidential election cycle. As these pollutants clouded online platforms, everyday politics, and seemingly the whole country, many citizens expressed shock that such storms were even possible. Many more remained oblivious to the dust they were themselves kicking up. A basic catalyst for these storms was, of course, the white nationalists and supremacists and broad-spectrum bigots themselves, who trampled through everyone else’s fields, throwing fistfuls of dirt into the air and whooping with delight. But other more well-meaning groups fed those same storms. In particular, journalists, tillers of the land by trade and regularly pressured to overproduce, blanketed the fields with dirt. Uniquely susceptible within these ranks were the mostly young and mostly white reporters raised on internet culture. As far-right reactionaries weaponized internet culture’s lulzy ethos and fetishized sight, reporters raised on those same norms were more likely to dismiss dehumanizing attacks as just trolling as usual, just edgy internet fun. They may not have meant to, but these journalists, along with so many others, tilled the lands and sowed the seeds for bigots. Once the soil was primed and the winds began to blow, it was only a matter of time before the sky went dark. 3 You Are Here 3. Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds The Truth about the Alt-Right, or Looking beyond the Usual Subjects On August 11, 2017, white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for the two-day Unite the Right rally, organized in response to the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The screaming white men who marched through the streets wore no hoods and made no apologies. Their hateful motives were reflected in torch-lit Nazi chants calling for the eradication of people and perspectives they feared would replace them. Counterprotesters resisted; one, Heather Heyer, was murdered. For many observers, the Unite the Right rally was synonymous with, or at least was the brainchild of, the “alt-right,” a euphemism for white nationalism and supremacy. Although the term quite literally whitewashed hate, many journalists and everyday citizens had adopted it heading into the 2016 election cycle. Even after the Unite the Right rally’s howling white supremacist violence, national news outlets persisted in using the term, often right in the headline or lede. Sometimes those stories quoted white supremacists who described themselves as “alt-right.” More often, the stories applied the label themselves. On the one hand, it was true that the Unite the Right rally was an “alt-right” event. On the other hand, the alt-right didn’t exist—at least not in the way it was so often framed. Teasing this point out means identifying what was true, and what was not, about the alt-right. Here are some true things. The term alt-right can be traced back to 2008, when white nationalist Richard Spencer first sought to rebrand white nationalism for a more refined audience. As political scientist George Hawley explains, Spencer’s alt-right—however sanitized it pretended to be—drew from the staunchly isolationist, anti-immigrant, and antiglobalist paleoconservatism movement; radical libertarianism; and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations.5 The term gained some initial traction and then went into a kind of hibernation; it persisted within certain circles but was not widely known otherwise. This changed in 2015, when, as Hawley notes, the term came in vogue among reactionary conservatives online.6 This reemergence coincided with what Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, called a “fringe 4 You Are Here 3. Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds insurgency” of global right-wing extremism.7 While the nationalist and supremacist core of the alt-right remained the same, the nature of its supporters began to shift, and the term broadened with them. Media scholars Alice Marwick and Becca Lewis chronicle this evolution.8 By 2016, the “accommodatingly imprecise” label was embraced by, or at least was being used to describe, a panoply of “conspiracy theorists, techno-libertarians, white nationalists, Men’s Rights advocates, trolls, anti- feminists, anti-immigration activists, and bored young people.”9 It also became tethered to the candidacy of one Donald J. Trump, who never publicly embraced the term but didn’t outright reject it, either—and certainly didn’t reject the supporters who embraced alt-right ideals, even if those supporters didn’t actively identify as alt-right. Baked into this Trumpian iteration was a very particular aesthetic predicated on irony and lulz. People operating under the “alt-right” mantle imprinted this aesthetic onto a nonstop deluge of internet memes, which they gleefully described as “pro-Trump shitposting.” Communication scholars Heather Suzanne Woods and Leslie A. Hahner explore how alt-right memes shaped public discourse during the 2016 election cycle.10 While memes were not the only weapon deployed by the alt-right during the election, Woods and Hahner argue, they were particularly effective bludgeons. “Ironic” memes, in which a bigoted position was couched behind a trollish wink, were especially common.

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