Making Monsters: Right-Wing Creation of the Liberal Enemy
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Making Monsters: Right-Wing Creation of the Liberal Enemy A Thesis Presented to The Division of History and Social Sciences Reed College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts Laura Jedeed May 2019 Approved for the Division (Political Science) Alexander Montgomery Acknowledgments First and foremost, I must thank my thesis advisor, Alexander Montgomery, for guiding me through this process, suggesting literature, and helping this thesis find its direction and purpose. Thank you also to Paul Gronke, my first reader and mentor. Both of you helped me mold and shape this thesis: I could not have done this without you. To whatever extent this document makes a cogent point, it is due to your patient guidance. Thank you also to my third and fourth readers, Radhika Natarajan and Ellen Millender, for your time in reading and responding to this work. A special thank you to Ellen, who has taught me so much about writing over the past three years and whose Roman history class remains eerily relevant to my work with the far right. Thank you to the Reed professors whose classes made this thesis possible. Thank you Ben Lazier for your incredible and life-changing class on Hannah Arendt and totalitarianism. Your use of Arendt to analyze the alt-right helped me to see nuance within the far-right milieu, and your conference leadership helped me become a clearer, bolder thinker. An enormous thank you also to Morgan Luker for teaching me about ethnography and encouraging me to interview people despite my social anxiety. Without your Musical Ethnography class, this thesis would have been impossible. Finally, thank you to Anand Vaidya for your carefully-curated Comparative Fascisms syllabus, and to Darius Rejali for your advice on frame analysis and feedback on the victory fable. Thank you to my parents, Doug and Hannah Krening, for your love and support. Mom, thank you for teaching me the value of intellectual curiosity. Without that curious skepticism, I would never have arrived where I am today. Thank you to my friends and family who have supported and encouraged me through this godless endeavor, especially: Steve Swann, Sterling Clark, Mia Leung, Emily Hebron, Samantha Krening, Trace Lund, and Jack Graham. An enormous thank you to Kelvin Lu for listening to me rant about the far right for countless hours and for helping me refine my arguments. Finally, I would like to thank my nine interviewees for sharing their stories with me. I have done my best to honor your trust by describing you fairly and accurately: as human beings with good intentions, not demons. I suspect you would not like this thesis if you read it, but I hope you would recognize yourselves in the portraits I have painted of you. Preface Saturday dawned sunny and cold. I put on my USA flag T-shirt, the only pair of jeans I own, and a warm lumberjack-style hat. I debate taking Luna, my German Shepherd mix, to the rally. This one is in Vancouver, so it’s likely to be peaceful. Of course, that’s what I thought last time, on Burnside, when things got loud and weird. I decide to leave her at home. I merge onto I-5 and drive north. Over a bridge, someone has hung a pink banner with a circle and three arrows—the sigil of Antifa. In purple letters: “These Queers Bash Back.” On the car stereo, Die Krupps is singing in heavily accented English. “In my native language, in my native land, I’m still the alien on a different planet. Makes it clear, I understand: We’re all strangers in a foreign land.” It certainly feels that way. Ethnographies are funny things. One studies and writes about the other, yet every word inevitably reflects the fatally biased perspective of the self. In this ethnography, I have done my best to present my subjects fairly and without bias, and I have undoubtedly failed. You, the reader, should therefore know what those biases are. I was raised in a conservative area, by a conservative family that subscribes to what are often termed far-right beliefs. I grew up reading the Limbaugh Letter and demonstrated in favor of the Iraq war. I strongly felt the appeal of violence as a solution to political problems, which was a major and explicit reason for my enlistment in the United States Army immediately upon graduation from high school. I am no longer a conservative, far-right or otherwise, and my faith in violence as a political tool has decreased significantly. When I think about far-right conservatives, however, I do not think about rednecks, or sociopaths, or specimens under glass. I think about friends and family. I think of myself. For me, the people of the far right are real human beings who do their best with the ideology and information they have. I cannot escape this knowledge, nor would I want to. I am also the daughter of a Syrian immigrant of color and am, therefore, a product of miscegenation—what the alt-right terms “white genocide.” I am intimately aware of my own humanity and the fundamental irrelevance of blood, and I have a vested interest in defeating forces that believe my existence is a problem to be solved in some way. I also have an interest in defeating those who help them, intentionally or not. This thesis uses sociological methods based in phenomenology to analyze the far- right. Phenomenology explicitly discards questions of objective truth or falsehood in favor of the question: what do the subjects believe to be true? This approach allows the ethnographer to get beyond their own biases and truly understand the subject. Moralization creates distance, and distance impedes understanding. My goal for this ethnography is to facilitate understanding through reduction of that distance. According to phenomenology, our beliefs create the world we see. As such, they also create our enemies. We make our own monsters. This thesis is about how a group called Patriot Prayer constructs their monsters, and how they spread this construction far beyond their own small membership. Phenomenology—and, by extension, this thesis—can only take us so far. Sociologist James Aho, whose book This Thing of Darkness was a principle inspiration for this approach, warns that phenomenological analyses of events risk a sort of ethical flattening, in which morality itself becomes a social construct.1 As such, humanistic phenomenology carries moral hazard. To complete this work, the reader must ultimately bring their own moral judgments to bear on the conclusions reached. 1 Aho, This Thing of Darkness, 18–20. List of Terms Alt-Right Explicitly ethnonationalist, racist right-wing movement: e.g. Richard Spencer, the Daily Stormer Alt-Lite Civic nationalists who deny racial or antisemitic beliefs: e.g. Breitbart, the Proud Boys Liberal As used in this thesis: The Far Right’s conception of the Leftist enemy. Can include leftists, Democrats, and/or centrists Nihilation The negation of information that conflicts with one’s own perception of reality, either through diminishing the status of the people providing the information or through denying their sincere belief in it. Troll An individual who purposefully presents themselves as something they are not in order to evoke a reaction from unaware second parties. Performative A troll who elicits reactions not solely for their own amusement, but also for Trolling consumption by a third-party audience. Fabling The construction of a simple narrative involving a protagonist and an antagonist who stand in for larger groups Racialist Someone who believes in biologically distinct races. Racist A racialist who also believes in a hierarchy of races and racial supremacy. Non-Racialist A person who holds neither overtly racialist or racist beliefs. This person may support institutional racism or hold subconscious racial bias. ENR European New Right. NWO New World Order Doxx To reveal an Internet personality’s actual identity, which can include home address and other personal details. Protagonist A member of the group under discussion Antagonist A member of the group that the protagonist seeks to portray as the enemy vii Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 17 Methodology ................................................................................................................. 20 Understanding Patriot Prayer ........................................................................................ 22 Chapter 1: Theories of Analysis .................................................................................... 25 Social Construction of Reality .................................................................................. 26 The Conspiratorial Universe ................................................................................. 31 Frame Analysis and Trolling .................................................................................... 34 Fabling ...................................................................................................................... 37 Background: Reification ....................................................................................... 37 Fabling Theory ...................................................................................................... 39 Group Formation and Solidarity ............................................................................... 40 Terminology .................................................................................................................. 44 Chapter 2: Birth of a Far-Right Nation .......................................................................