How about if a single event could convince large numbers of people to:
1. Hand in their guns and embrace their own disarmament.
2. Embrace policies for censorship.
3. Create fear of white males as boogeymen.
4. Introduce the world to NZ's trans prime minister.
5. Pray to the god of Islam and/or be sympathetic towards Muslims.
6. Provoke and escalate religious animosity.
7. Participate in witchcraft on the Ides of March.
Obviously, I disagree with Rob's interpretation of the NZ shooting and disapprove of seeing it portrayed in this way by anyone. Obviously, it's his personal opinion, not Epik's.
At the same time, I'm a guest in this world; and I have to share it with innumerable people I disagree with and whose statements I disapprove of. If the goal is to get along as a community and/or to persuade others, then Step 1 is understanding what the other person believes – accurately, not as a straw-man caricature. To have any constructive dialogue, we must be able to paraphrase an opponent's viewpoint in a way they themselves will recognize as fair.
So I'll try to re-state Rob's opinion here, though I'm not sympathetic to it. As follows: There was a shooting in New Zealand in which many people died. Thereafter – so Rob believes – the media and/or the government presented a false or distorted picture of what occurred. And they did this deliberately, in Rob's view, in order to promote an ideological worldview with which Rob disagrees. Or, at least, Rob believes it is reasonable to suspect this and to investigate it.
I dispute all of that on factual grounds. But I want to make a few points:
Yes, indeed, mainstream news outlets DO circulate fake news and propaganda, deliberately or unwittingly or due to willing bias. That includes video hoaxes.
Just a day or 2 ago, a video hoax appeared that shows Notre Dame burning with the sound of muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar” superimposed. Of course, it was concocted by white nationalists expressly to “provoke and escalate religious animosity”. (For reference, that is concern #6 in Rob’s list.) That fabricated video has circulated on Youtube since. Meanwhile, on Twitter, a fake CNN account was engineered to blame muslims for the fire. See here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...me-fire/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.05ee28b110d0
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-n...ks-islamophobic-theories-social-media-n995091
This false narrative, originally designed to incite hatred toward muslims, was spread by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and by ex-host Glenn Beck. Were they duped? Yes, but not innocently. Many on the political right in the USA have an anti-muslim bias. So stories that share that bias are more likely to be picked up than others that are “sympathetic towards muslims” (Rob’s phrase).
In Rob Monster’s defense, he was quick to say:
while Muslims likely will get blamed, I don't believe they did it.
https://www.namepros.com/threads/wh...-and-rob-monster.1128748/page-46#post-7196301
Even those who have condemned Rob should give him credit for making that statement. It was the right thing to do. And, as far as I can tell, he went out of his way to say that without being asked by anyone. Certainly I didn’t ask him to. (There is no coordination between Rob and me whatsoever regarding NamePros posts. We are both acting separately as individuals.)
The point is this: Suspicion about video hoaxes being used as propaganda IS JUSTIFIABLE. Many of you reading this will accept that bigots on the alt-right fabricated the video to blame muslims, as I’ve described. If you’re like me, then you feel predisposed to believe that – whereas you DON’T feel predisposed to believe that the NZ massacre video was a hoax perpetrated by the establishment. What’s the difference? Facts support 1 case and not the other. But I haven’t done any fact checking. Have you? Trusted sources? That’s part of it. But I’m referring to our predisposition to believe 1 and not the other. And that’s based on the worldview, the biases, the habits we begin with.
Examine your own willingness to believe what I’ve said about the Notre Dame video hoax. Now invert it. Imagine that you began with a worldview in which governments and the media are trying to take away guns, criminalize certain kinds of dissent as “hate speech”, celebrate multiculturalism as a way to change immigration policy, habituate the public to LGBTQ politicians, etc. If you believed in that media / government agenda and felt threatened by it, under siege – as half the USA does – then you might be wary of a news story or video that seems to serve that agenda.
Is that fear legitimate? That’s up for debate. News outlets do have biases and agendas. That’s inevitable because the people involved share a worldview and values. They select stories based on those assumptions, and they present them in the context of those assumptions. Certainly, those of us who dislike Fox News can see the biases of its coverage. And it’s pointless saying that Glenn Beck or Tucker Carlson aren’t part of the mainstream media or that they’re “fringe” pundits, given an audience numbering 10 million or thereabouts.
Other than item #7 on Rob’s list (about witchcraft), the other concerns are all staples of the Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or mainstream right-wing paranoia (as I’d personally see it). Half of America will object to my using the word “paranoia”. And I admit it’s an antagonistic word choice. They’re not crazy to see people coming after their guns (#1). A lot of us would like to limit gun ownership. They’re not crazy to suspect that parts of the media or the government would like to normalize being trans (#3). That is a stated goal among progressives, which I share unabashedly. They are not crazy to be anxious about censorship (#2). That is a trend that worries me as well, notwithstanding the fact that I’m on the political left. They ARE crazy, in my view, to fear praying to the God of Islam, since I don’t see liberal democracies ushering in the modern caliphate. But that paranoia flourished during Obama’s presidency with deluded conservatives believing he was a “secret muslim”. So it’s no shock to see that paranoia alive and well now that the birther in chief is POTUS.
As stated, I disagree with Rob’s interpretation of the NZ massacre video and disapprove of it. I disagree on factual grounds – meaning that I believe it really shows the deaths of 50 innocent muslims. And I disapprove because I suspect the motives of those who originally pushed this conspiracy theory were to deflect attention from white nationalism, which has provoked this and other terrorist violence.
Yes, I think Rob is wrong about the video. I don’t believe governments, scientists, and the media are conspiring to push round-earth propaganda. But if I distrusted the authorities to that extent, as Rob clearly does, then it wouldn’t be unthinkable to distrust what’s on the news. It’s easy for us to reject the extreme skepticism of a conspiracy theorist. At the same time, we should recognize the smaller effects of biases and agendas in the media. And we cannot be blind to the hype within right-wing media ... in which conservative Americans have been steeped now for decades, thanks to Rupert Murdoch et al. That hype includes soft-core conspiracy theories about immigrant caravans and muslims and the like every day. Moreover, it attacks rival news outlets as “biased” incessantly. More recently that rhetoric has repurposed the phrase “fake news” to discredit all news outlets that aren’t overtly right-wing. Trump has done this, and others have happily joined in. So it’s no accident that people are willing to believe in ever more extreme conspiracy theories about news stories.
Rob is wrong about the facts, I would say. And I wish he were more sensitive to the implications for muslims of some of the things he says. For example, there is nothing wrong with asking the public to “be sympathetic towards Muslims” – particularly following a massacre of muslims (#5). Bad choice of words, Rob. Since I know Rob personally is sympathetic to muslim employees and acquaintances on a daily basis, I know he would be a thousand times more sympathetic to innocent victims of a shooting. What he meant to say, I suspect, is that he is not sympathetic to Islam as worldview – nor to the Islamization of society, which he believes is happening. To me, fearing a pro-muslim agenda seems xenophobic and far-fetched to the point of paranoia, but half of Americans – the Trump-voting, Fox-listening half – are freaked out about muslims or Mexicans taking over. What does Rob mean when he objects to a narrative that is “sympathetic toward Muslims”? It’s about religion or worldview, not individuals. Rob is convinced that his own form of christianity is true, and he is perhaps less willing to see the value in other religions that deny the truth of his religion. Nothing new. Protestants in the UK and the USA have historically been equally fearful of catholics and mormons. Beyond that, we have decades of disinformation in right-wing American culture about Islam. Indeed, centuries of disinformation dating back to the Crusades and later to the French and English empires. All of that annoys me. But the problem is much larger than Rob, who is (despite views I disagree with completely) a nice guy.
