Extreme Headlines & Inconvenient Realities
Are Edge Cases Still Edge Cases When They Happen Every Day?
(Mis)information
There’s a very familiar narrative on the left. It’s so familiar that I wager that it will probably appear in any extended dialogue with a convinced progressive these days. That’s certainly been my experience.
Here it is: the insurgence of reconstituted traditionalist, nationalist, and anti-immigrant parties around the world has been driven by misinformation. It’s actually quite a smug, arrogant claim, for it presumes that the claimant knows the difference between information and ‘misinformation.’ That’s a dubious assertion, given that he or she probably believed that Germany’s green energy transition wouldn’t devastate its industrial economy, that feminism wouldn’t immiserate masses of women and top out at around 50%-60% identification rates among women (and those tending to cluster around the richer and younger ends of the axes, where women have the social and financial flexibility to proclaim nonsense with relative impunity), that #BLM wouldn’t turn out to be part online moral hysteria and part cynical corporate grift, etc.
Would you trust the judgment concerning information integrity of people who either participated in or fell for literally dozens of psyops in the past half-decade (president Biden is perfectly fine; videos of his senescence are “cheap fakes”; Elon Musk is endeavoring to take control of the personal data for nefarious business reasons, Kamala Harris is going to win the election; the southern border of the United States in 2021 and 2022 was totally secure and under control; the “far-right” or “white supremacy” or some other nebulous quantity is the biggest national security threat to the United States, Antifa doesn’t exist - even as a radical, cellular, terroristic activist network involved in low-level violence, trans people don’t commit violence against women in locker rooms or prisons or schools and mentioning this possibility is as hateful as it is absurd, the obscene government spending of the last administration won’t increase consumer inflation and the opening of the border won’t result in native job losses across dozens of stable and lucrative industries, etc.)?
To this day, of course, opinions vary about many of these propositions, but the key takeaway is that on every one the legacy media narrative has been abandoned by even their own outlets. This is important. If there’s enough information to sustain a narrative it becomes encoded in the popular wisdom as time moves on. It becomes another brick in the gargantuan wall of self-justifying fictions that the power structure uses to wall itself in, and insurgents out - to protect its own privileges and prerogatives. The fact that for each of these important, hotly-debated issues (and I deliberately left out the smorgasbord of establishment lies and malicious errors around COVID Policy) the establishment has basically ceded the field. Informed people who aren’t in the grips of ideological capture generally don’t ascribe to the progressive-consumerist party line on any of these issues. Ideas which were forcefully consigned to the margins, as ‘conspiracy theories',’ now occupy the mainstream. So if someone had assured you at the time that they knew the whole deal, and each of these propositions really was just misinformation, when the propositions turned out to be broadly valid and accurate would you trust them? Neither would I, and that is precisely the position that most progressive culture-makers (legacy news outlets, writers, filmmakers, academics, activists and nonprofit and QUANGO creatures) now find themselves in. They have spent a decade assuring us that reality was one way when in fact it was and is very different. The reality which has emerged, by slow investigation and consensus, actually looks very similar to the vision which was described by the opponents of these progressive culture-makers. At the time these opponents were castigated, ostracized, punished, and reviled. Doubtless the progressives would still like to do this, but they can’t - to their immense frustration - and so they’ve resorted to withdrawal into their institutional citadels… and occasionally firebombing businesses or assaulting ICE officers or murdering star opponents.
Edge Cases (?)
Are edge cases still edge cases when they occur all the time? Are outliers still outliers when they become so frequent that they move well towards the center of the normal distribution? I rather think not.
‘Edge case’ probably was never the most apt term for the phenomenon I applied it to: the occasional newsworthy (although regularly suppressed) explosion of horrific Blob policy failure: murders of peaceful citizens by obscenely-habitual recidivists, the punishment of peaceful (usually unorganized, and therefore vulnerable) speakers or posters on social media and its contrast with the marked impunity of murderous - even inciting - rhetoric by favored groups, the regular avalanche of fatal negligence (which is simply not as proscribed in many non-Western cultures), murder, and rape - including the systematic rape of children - by first-generation arrivals to the country.
I have been hesitant to write about this subject, simply due to its enormity. Whatever your political leanings, you must now admit that these ‘edge cases’ are decidedly not edge cases. They are a daily occurrence in the United States and Canada and Germany and Great Britain and many more. How could I describe a trend which has swept across most of the western world, and has grown in frequency and intensity for nearly a decade now? But I realized that that is really the point. These horrors are so regular that they’ve become sadly mundane. The details vary by country of course (Great Britain distinguishing itself with its profoundly unethical two-tier application of justice and government attention, and its ongoing ‘grooming gang’ scandal involving tens of thousands of girls) but the trend is fixed and, I would say, undeniable across the western world. No one is claiming these things aren’t happening. They’re merely deciding that they don’t matter, because they don’t accord with their ideological emphases. But this stance is getting harder and harder to take as the tide of blood and mayhem continues to rise daily.
You cannot claim that we’re in an existential crisis, full of horror and oppression… and that you condemn political violence. Those two messages, when broadcast to millions of people, are inherently contradictory. And these people know it.
A Litany of Horror
The legacy media still endeavors to suppress and under-report and warp these stories, so they must perceive them to be somewhat important. I wager that these kinds of profoundly counter-narrative events have probably changed more minds in the past few years than every political speech and fundraising campaign and advertising budget combined, and the changes haven’t been ambivalent. These kinds of stories only push people the to the right, which these days simply means into the camp of skepticism about the progressive-consumerist power structure (the Blob) and its international value system (cheekily called ‘GloboHomo’ on the online right). That value system proclaims that the individual is paramount, that buying and working and vacationing are all good but that the important thing is that people be dependent upon the administrative state, and that the most important attribute of those individuals (other than their fealty to said administrative state) is their demographic category (racial, sexual, cultural, abnormal psychological) - which are used as levers and mechanisms to both administer and control the larger society. It supports an unhealthy obsession with subjectivity and feelings and financial independence, and so it is a natural partner for feminism. The worst thing that can happen, in the eyes of the Blob, is for people to begin to get healthier, educate their own children, develop independent and resilient communities, and have large and capable families. Virtually any amount of social breakdown and urban crime and sexual offense is preferable to that hellish scenario - but the promises of the Blob must be couched in terms which gesture towards effectiveness. If the only visible result of the expansion of the administrative state is that people get sicker and fatter and cities get poorer and more dangerous and less trustful and society gets more divided and unhappy (and those are precisely the results of administrative state expansion - even if you won’t grant the causal factor, the correlations are undeniable)… well then people are going to begin to question the assumptions and commands of the administrative state. How do you think the digital ID rollout would have gone in Great Britain 4-5 years ago? The managerial class are losing power, and they seem to sense it.
Helping to distribute these stories - gruesome and discouraging as they are - is one way of furthering this trend. What, after all, is the point of a managed society when the managers are arrogant, oblivious, and incompetent? What’s the point of changes to prosecution and bail policies or immigration laws when the main results of these changes for law-abiding natives seems to be an increase in danger, violence, and state oppression? Those are the questions that these kinds of stories quietly ignite.
A Very Partial List:
Is anyone claiming that all of these things didn’t happen? Of course not. They’re just harmful to the Blob’ narrative, and therefore deprioritized when it comes to information distribution. Libs of TikTok became so potent and popular because it was filling a gaping hole left my the propaganda maneuverings of media organizations that sat closer to power.
You will notice that, excepting a minority of these examples, they are generally reported by conservative-leaning outlets and publications. That effectively means that mainstream organizations are systematically refusing to print and post these stories. It’s very likely that liberals have never encountered most, or even any, of them.
Share them now.
What do all of these news stories have in common? They all implicitly call into question the progressive orthodoxies which aren’t sustained by free belief and debate, but are rather artifacts of manipulation and power. Every post and headline is an indictment, for which the administrators have little response. So they pretend that they don’t happen, or that they don’t happen often, or that they simply don’t matter. They’re inconvenient and detrimental to the agenda, therefore they must be kept off of the radar - even if they cost thousands of lives each year. But this pretense has worn ludicrously thin. Just think: if these are the data points that a single casual internet browser partially encounters in a 1-2 year period, imagine the entire scale and shape of the problems, in reality. That is the understanding that the Blob desperately doesn’t want you to have. If given the opportunity it will ruin lives and careers and imprison thousands in order to try to keep this kind of data mostly hidden. Will they be willing to bomb buildings? Kill their own citizens? Foment civil war (Chicago’s hesitant example hints that some would) and atrocity, in order to cling to power?
Perhaps we’ll find out.
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself.
It's amazing that the left always focuses on the enforcement mechanism and tries to portray it as arbitrary and racist. They never focus on the actual bad actors or the problem itself. The problem exists and we have to monitor it. Justifiable government inquiry and enforcement is not tyrannical.
As a previous Guardian reader and CNN and MSN podcast consumer, when you see how you have been pulled into a particular narrative, it is very hard to go back.
Thanks James. You speak a language that resonates with me. The capacity of the activist few to influence many is still very much part of our society. The oppressor victim dichotomy has been a very powerful tool to divide us internally. But it has also been so damaging to those strident believers whose mental health is now in such a poor state.
Your writing adds to our slow reclamation of common sense as we are able to see the damage inflicted over the past decade or more.