Who’s Grooming?

The public expression of bigotry and hatred is evidently cyclical. The election of Donald Trump gave racists permission to voice sentiments that had previously been banished from polite company; that permission has since extended to an eruption of anti-Semitism and homophobia.

Until Elon Musk bought Twitter, much of that vitriol was confined online to the “dark web” and a sprinkling of small social media platforms serving communities of bigots. Musk has now invited them back, making it more difficult to avoid encountering the seamy underworld populated by these angry and hateful people.

There have always been fabrications shared among people needing to justify their prejudices–against Jews, there was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and a variety of blood libels. More recently, attacks against LGBTQ people have been focused on hysteria over so-called “grooming”–accusations that echo old libels about gay pedophilia.

Suddenly, drag queen story hours have been re-imagined as preludes to child sexual abuse.

Salon recently reported on an incident that reflects this effort to paint gay people and their allies as “groomers”–and the willingness of GOP politicians to jump on that bandwagon.

Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, falsely accused Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., of saying that “pedophilia isn’t a crime” when Porter actually said that LGBTQ people have been wrongly branded on social media as “groomers” and “pedophiles.”

The exchange between Porter and Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, came during a Congressional hearing held to listen to survivors of the Club Q shooting and other activists, who testified that anti-LGBTQ violence was being encouraged by hateful right-wing rhetoric.

HRC had reported on  “the 500 most viewed, most influential tweets that identified LGBTQ people as so-called ‘groomers.'”

“The ‘groomer’ narrative is an age-old lie to position LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids,” Porter said. “And what it does is deny them access to public spaces, it stokes fear, and can even stoke violence.”

Porter went on to ask why Twitter allows posts calling LGBTQ+ people “groomers,” since it presumably has a “hateful content” policy; Robinson responded that while community guidelines exist, platforms also need to hold users accountable to those guidelines. Twitter  clearly isn’t doing so.

“[T]his allegation of ‘groomer’ and of ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow, and engaged in criminal acts, merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity,” Porter said. “So this is clearly prohibited under Twitter’s content. Yet you found hundreds of these posts on the platform.”

If anything about HRC’s report could be considered “good news,” it was a finding that a very small group is driving this homophobic effort. The bad news is their attacks are reaching millions of people.

Just ten people drove 66% of impressions for the 500 most viewed hateful “grooming” tweets — including Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw, extremist members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and pro-Trump activists like “Libs of TikTok” founder Chaya Raichik.

The report found that posts from the 10 people alone reached more than 48 million views, and the top 500 most influential “grooming” tweets altogether were seen 72 million times.

In tweets by Jackson and Libs of TikTok, the exchange between Porter and Robinson was deliberately and falsely reported as Porter saying that pedophilia “isn’t a crime.”

Jackson further amplified the falsehood and tweeted: “Katie Porter just said that pedophilia isn’t a crime, she said it’s an ‘identity.’ THIS IS THE EMBODIMENT OF EVIL! The sad thing is that this woman isn’t the only VILE person pushing for pedophilia normalization. This is what progressives believe!”

As despicable as this Rightwing effort to blame the nation’s troubles on “those people”–gays, Blacks, Jews, immigrants, progressives–these attempts at misdirection aren’t new.  Would-be authoritarians, lacking any positive agenda (the GOP hasn’t even bothered to produce a party platform lately), fall back to inculcating fear and repeating a tine-tested message: if your life isn’t going the way you want it to, it’s the fault of [fill in your targeted demographic.]

Ignore us. Look at the shiny object.

Unfortunately, there really is “grooming” going on. Those campaigning to paint “the other” as dangerous, nefarious and unAmerican are the ones grooming young people and those who don’t know any better–teaching them that differences are threatening, that they are victims, and that the problems they face are never their fault or the fault of the people who look and pray like they do.

As a witness at that hearing testified, that hateful lesson–“grooming” children to become bigots– evidently requires attacking someone in a wig reading “Red Fish, Blue Fish” to a group of children at a library.

I am so tired of these people!

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Politics Kills

The Washington Post recently ran an article with a provocative headline: “Can Politics Kill You? Research Says the Answer Increasingly is Yes.” Here’s the lede:

As the coronavirus pandemic approaches its third full winter, two studies reveal an uncomfortable truth: The toxicity of partisan politics is fueling an overall increase in mortality rates for working-age Americans.

In one study, researchers concluded that people living in more-conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to COVID. The other, which looked at health outcomes more broadly, found that the more conservative a state’s policies, the shorter the lives of working-age people.

It turns out that it is state-level policies that determine these health outcomes. States — those “laboratories of democracy” so often lauded by more conservative politicians– shape the environments in which we live our lives in more ways than we commonly recognize, and those environments have a significant effect on people’s well-being and longevity.  As the article notes,

Some states have expanded their social safety nets, raising minimum wages and offering earned income tax credits while using excise taxes to discourage behaviors — such as smoking — that have deleterious health consequences. Other states have moved in the opposite direction.

Indiana is one of those “opposite direction” states.

Covid death rates were 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments and 26 percent higher in areas where voters lean conservative. Similar results emerged about hospital ICU capacity when the concentration of political power in a state was conservative.

Researchers from Harvard found that the disparities in rates of  death and disease aren’t limited to COVID: In states where a “chasm of inequality” persists, communities of color face a much higher risk of chronic conditions that leave immune systems vulnerable to multiple serious diseases.

Another  study calculated that, in 2019, if all states had implemented liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, criminal justice, health and welfare, labor, marijuana, and economic and tobacco taxes, at least 170,000 lives would have been  be saved. On the other hand, if states all had conservative versions of those policies, 217,000 more people would have died.

It’s likely to get worse in those Red states, thanks to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

With abortion services no longer legal nationwide, university researchers have estimated that maternal deaths could increase by up to 25 to 30 percent, worsening the nation’s maternal mortality and morbidity crisis. Americans live shorter lives than people in peer nations, in part because it is the worst place among high-income countries to give birth.

The stark differences between Republican and Democratic responses to COVID may have  benefitted Democrats politically, as well as medically.

Some midterm election postmortems suggested that the significantly higher numbers of Republican deaths had  diminished Republican turnout sufficiently to help Democratic candidates win tight races. While most knowledgable observers discounted that likelihood, or opined that it operated only in extremely close contests, researchers did identify a less obvious way in which COVID death rate disparities benefited Democrats politically.

Per Politico:

Data from the U.S. Postal Service and Census Bureau shows how the pandemic drove urban professionals who were able to work remotely — disproportionately Democrats — out of coastal, progressive cities to seek more space or recreational amenities in the nation’s suburbs and Sun Belt. This moved liberals out of electoral districts where Democrats reliably won by large margins into many purple regions that had the potential to swing with just small changes to the map.

Politico looked at several close races in places that had gained population during the pandemic–races that seemed to confirm that hypothesis. One was in Arizona.

In one of the most watched 2022 races, Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake — an ardent election denier and so-called Trump in heels — was expected to narrowly defeat Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. FiveThirtyEight simulations gave her 2-to-1 odds and a 2.2-point margin.

But Arizona’s most populous region, Maricopa County gained nearly 100,000 people since 2018, and Democrats’ margins rose by 17 points since that year. Lake lost by just 17,000 votes.

A major study published by the National Bureau of Economic Researchers concluded that there was a “substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available.” Overall, the study found that the excess death rate for Republicans was 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of vaccine efficacy, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis–object of the GOP’s current enthusiasm–  is ramping up his vendetta against vaccination. DeSantis is a perfect representative of today’s GOP, a party peddling policies that really are killing people.

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The Problem With Dogma

A recent column by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times focused on an impediment to positive social change that routinely drives me nuts: activists for causes I agree with who insist on making the perfect the enemy of the good.

It isn’t just the MAGA ideologues who are prisoners of their own ideology. Goldberg’s column focuses on organizations on the left that have been roiled by internal conflicts pitting purists against pragmatists.

In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues.

Recently, Maurice Mitchell, who heads up the progressive Working Families Party, has written about  what Goldberg calls “the left’s self-sabotaging impulse.”

Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits. Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.

As Goldberg notes, these impulses are not new. She points out that “destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution.”

I can think of two relatively recent illustrations of that tendency, one local and one national.

On the local level, I am personally aware of two incidents where internal insistence on maximal (and performative) devotion to non-discrimination resulted in the very public ejection of leaders who were accused of encouraging  a less-than-ideal racial environment; in both of those situations, the executive found to be imperfect was anything but a bigot. (In one, there was actually an investigation by an outside company that found absolutely no evidence to support the allegations.) To the contrary, both had been involved in anti-discrimination activities for several years.

On the national level, I am convinced that dogmatic excesses actually diminished the beneficial impact of the #MeToo movement. (Admission: I still resent the unnecessary loss of Al Franken from the U.S. Senate thanks to indignation over a dumb joke told before he ran for office.)

When #MeToo first emerged, I applauded. Like all women, I had encountered unwanted “approaches” from men ranging from boorish behaviors to significantly worse and I certainly recognized the unfairness of blaming the victim (complaints about sexual assaults being dismissed with “well, what was she wearing?” or other responses suggesting that the woman was somehow “asking for it.”) Holding predators rather than their victims responsible was long overdue. Sending a message that unwanted touching and worse are not amusing, not a male prerogative, and not to be tolerated was also long overdue.

That said, there is a difference between unwanted attention and assault.

Inappropriate behaviors occur on a continuum–and responses to those behaviors should be calibrated to the severity of the behavior. Furthermore, fundamental fairness requires rejecting essentialism– all men are not dogs, and all women are not saints. Taking women seriously is not the same thing as uncritically believing anything and everything any woman says. An accusation of impropriety should be considered a rebuttable presumption–true, until and unless there is probative evidence to the contrary.

More generally, those of us old folks who have been “in the trenches” for a long time generally recognize that “strategy” is not a curse word, and a focus on strategic considerations is not evidence of insufficient devotion to the cause at hand.

Over the years, most of us learn to favor evolution over revolution, recognizing that sustainable progress is almost always incremental and that half a loaf really is better than no bread at all.

Recognizing that we aren’t going to change the world tomorrow to meet activists’ most exacting specifications doesn’t make people traitors to the cause.

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Trust

Back in 2009, I wrote a book titled “Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence.” It was intended as a rebuttal to then-emerging arguments that America’s low levels of trust were a response to the country’s increasing diversity–that our differences had eroded our ability to trust our neighbors, and that interpersonal distrust had extended to our governing institutions.

As I argued then–and still believe–that conclusion gets it backwards. I think the degree of “generalized social trust” is dependent upon our ability to trust our social and governing institutions. In other words, when we cannot trust our government or the business community or religious institutions, that skepticism infects our views of our neighbors.

No matter which analysis is correct, the absence of that “generalized social  trust” is a major problem. Without it, systems cannot operate, authorities cannot govern. And the fact of its absence has been confirmed by numerous polls and studies.

As Governing Magazine reported in September,

The last half century has been a period of great disillusionment. In the 1950s the American people overwhelmingly trusted their government, their president, news sources, educational systems, and basic American institutions from the Justice Department to the Department of Defense. Today the American people are largely disaffected and cynical about those same institutions. A recent NBC News poll indicated that 74 percent of the American people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to Gallup, the American people’s general confidence in their national institutions is at an all-time low, averaging 27 percent, down from just under 50 percent in 1979.

In the last year alone the people have reported significant losses in respect for 16 national institutions: The police have a 45 percent approval rating, down 6; the American health-care system 38 percent, down 6; organized religion 31 percent, down 6; public schools 28 percent, down 4; the Supreme Court 25 percent, down 11; the presidency, 23 percent, down 15; the criminal justice system 14 percent, down 6; television news 11 percent, down 5; and Congress, as usual at the bottom of the barrel, with only 7 percent approval, down 5. And yet the incumbency re-election rate for members of Congress is nearly 95 percent.

The article reminds us that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson opined about the “social harmony without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.”

An increasing number of Americans are convinced that our national institutions–especially government– are no longer working. In my book–written during the George W. Bush administration (which in retrospect looks almost benign)– I argued that fish rot from the head. In other words, news of multiplying, numerous scandals– about the administration, about businesses like Enron and WorldCom, revelations about abuses in the churches, reports of unethical behaviors in major league sports– had eroded the public’s trust in most of America’s institutions, very much including government.

As the Governing article put it,

Our national political system is in a state of advanced paralysis. The culture wars (broadly defined) indicate that we are at the very least two nations now, urban blue and rural red, and neither grants much legitimacy to the other. You hear people saying, “I don’t want to live in Nancy Pelosi’s America” or “I don’t want to live in Donald Trump’s America.” And yet, at least for the foreseeable future, we have to share the continent.

The article considered the potential reasons for the erosion of trust: perhaps–given the fact that we now have so much information and news. our cynicism and disillusionment aren’t irrational. Maybe we were naive before, and now we aren’t. But a significant factor  has been the drumbeat of  Republican rhetoric for much of the last 50 years.

The American public has been inundated with denunciations of government and government agencies, especially following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. (It was Reagan who said, “The top nine most terrifying words in the English Language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” )

Beginning with the Gingrich insurgency in 1994 and taking on more aggression in the politics of the Tea Party and more recently the Freedom Caucus, Republican anti-government conservatives have made their way to Washington, D.C., with the express purpose of dismantling parts of the national government…The Trump presidency was particularly corrosive.

It’s hard to disagree with the article’s conclusion that a nation is held together by trust in shared purpose and shared values, and  that national  cohesion is lost when we no longer believe that our fellow citizens share our values or merit our trust.

In my research for the book, I found substantial scholarship emphasizing the role of fear in generating distrust. Citizens in societies with robust social safety nets and low crime rates are significantly more trusting than countries where many citizens live more precarious lives. The implications of those findings should inform American policy.

Unfortunately, ideological blinders make that recognition unlikely..

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Voice

Katherine Tyler Scott is a Fellow of the International Leadership Association, and closer to home, a board member of Women4Change Indiana. She chairs a committee of that latter organization on which I serve, and recently she shared with me an essay she’d written for a publication of the former.

It deserves wider distribution.

The essay focused on a lessons we should take from the  war in Ukraine–especially the power of voice.

To those of us who share Katherine’s belief that we must oppose injustice and oppression “in any form, against anyone, anywhere”. she has a message: she argues that silence in such instances is unacceptable.

Many people around the world filled the streets and exercised their voices in protest of the public murder of George Floyd. It was impossible to turn away and not see what was in plain sight, to deny how the long history of dehumanization had contributed to the knee of oppression. We are called now to do the same on behalf of humanity. In America, the value of freedom is etched on a plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, cited in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the United States Constitution, and sustained by civic engagement. Our diversity does not discount the universal desire for freedom. This basic right to which every human being is entitled is always at risk of attack. Events, unforeseen or planned, can create major disruption and insecurity alongside crippling levels of anxiety and fear — states of emotionality in which people are willing to trade their freedom for the quick fix.

Katherine attributes the rise of autocracies around the globe to the pervasive, chronic anxiety that seems to accompany social change–a state that makes systems of any kind vulnerable, unable to cope productively with that change.

But then she notes Ukraine’s fierce resistance to Russia in defense of freedom.

The Ukrainian President and the country’s citizens have been subject to these same dynamics and forces of change yet have become an inspiring counter to a loss of the ability to cope. Why?

In large part, it is because of collective aspirations, shared core beliefs, a strong identity as a people, and an understanding of the desire to become a country where people can be free. These are powerful determinants of response, but all become more powerful when they are given voice. President Volodymyr Zelensky is that voice for his country and for millions around the world. In using it, he has galvanized people across the globe to remember what matters and what is required when civilization is under threat. A major mitigating factor to society’s chronic anxiety is the self-differentiated leader, and we are seeing it in Zelensky. He reminds us of the power of voice — one and many. We are seeing why words matter. His voice, his words, have encapsulated the universal yearning of humanity: to live, to live free, and in doing so, to have the opportunity to live a life of meaning — a life that matters and makes a difference.

This emphasis on voice really resonated with me, because voice is the one weapon possessed by ordinary Americans. Those of us without piles of money or offices of influence often despair of making a difference; I know that I look at aspects of our collective life that I  consider dangerous or forbidding and feel helpless to oppose or change them.

I lack the power to keep Indiana’s legislators from distorting the operation of democratic accountability by choosing their voters. I  cannot “reprogram” a racist MAGA movement, or keep the planet from warming, or “fix” other multiple threats to democracy, civility and the rule of law. Neither can most of the other Americans who wring their hands over these and other ominous and worrisome aspects of our collective life.

But we do have our voices, and Katherine reminds us that those voices matter—that raising them will make a difference.

The recent protests in Iran and China moved even those autocratic governments–Iran has reportedly abolished its Morality Police (although there are conflicting reports of that), and China has relaxed its draconian COVID policies. Small steps, admittedly, but evidence of the truth of Katherine’s observation.

At the very least, we need to remember that citizens’ voices–through letters and emails to legislators and other public officials, through demonstrations, through civic organizations, through lawsuits–can attest to our lack of acquiescence with an unacceptable status quo. Our voices can also encourage our fellow-citizens to raise theirs.

As Zelensky has demonstrated, words matter.

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