A turning point?
A gory week in politics exposes ideological rot, and emerging backlash against groupthink.
Note: I open this piece with a summary of murder victim Iryna Zarutska’s final moments. If you’re not up to reading any moderately graphic details right now, skip straight to the second paragraph. You may also want to avoid reading my second footnote.
Words utterly fail to express the gravity of what CCTV cameras captured during Iryna Zarutska’s last moments on Earth. The casual brutality of her attacker stabbing her in the neck, dripping blood throughout the light rail car as he walks, not runs, away. The abject shock, terror, then sadness on her face as she realizes she has been stabbed, then collapses to the floor as she bleeds out. The callous indifference of the surrounding passengers, who reflexively keep their eyes to themselves and squirm in their seats, likely thinking this is no different from the countless other times they’ve witnessed somebody acting crazy on public transportation— at least, until her blood starts to spread. A couple of minutes pass before a man comes to her aid, using the army green shirt off his back to try to stop her bleeding while calling 911. A woman soon joins him. They are both too late to save her life, though I hope against hope that they at least came in time to show Iryna that someone on that train cared about her.
In a halfway sane, rational country, the circumstances around Zarutska’s death would have prompted a sober, unifying conversation about solutions. There are many common sense steps we can take to make it harder for dangerous people to harm others or themselves, make public spaces safer, and train ourselves to intervene instead of ignoring people in dire circumstances.
But you already know where we live, Reader. So, of course, this conversation initially broke down along disproportionately ideological lines.
I was shocked when I first saw this story on social media late last week. But I was sadly unsurprised by how it continued unfolding a couple of days later — shamelessly recast as a political trend story rather than a tragic account of an almost entirely preventable crime. As soon as I saw reports that Wikipedia editors were trying to scrub Zarutska’s story from their site, followed by Axios’ “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message” headline, I got a nagging feeling in my gut.
I know this move… they’re still running the same play.
I swiped out of social media and went straight to my inbox— specifically the place where I still keep tabs on some of the counter-disinfo networks I used to work with. Sure enough, there they were, highlighting Iryna’s last moments as nothing more than a high-velocity “right wing media trend” to watch in the days to come.
For years now, “counter-disinformation” professionals have trained Democrat politicians and staffers, left-leaning advocacy organizations, and allies in Big Tech and the mass media to handle alleged disinformation or ‘toxic narratives’ in a very specific manner. First, ignore a troublesome incident or content whenever possible, to avoid giving it more exposure. (Years ago, when social media networks were more cooperative, they could also get certain content removed. Many Big Tech platforms have since stiffened their spines a bit, but the structure and culture among Wikipedia editors is a different, more complex story.) If monitoring scans indicate the content or story is still going viral enough to spread beyond its original social networks and influence broader audiences, move to ‘inoculate’ people against it by discrediting it.
It appears to me that’s what Groupthinking media outlets were attempting to do by reducing conversations about Iryna’s death to an “accelerant” in a “right-wing firestorm” or an attempt to bolster the “MAGA crime narrative.” It’s a thought-stopping tactic that relies on guilt by association, signaling to their audiences that there’s nothing to see here. No need to question why serial offenders are free to shank unsuspecting people in the neck on their commute home! Don’t be like those disinformed racists. Say it with us: crime rates are underreported and distorted down!
Unfortunately for them, mislabeling concern over stories like this as fuel for a “right wing crime narrative” only works to devalue it among the dwindling ranks of die-hard partisans. For people whose common decency is stronger than their partisan identity, it serves as a wake-up call to start questioning people and outlets who immediately attempt to discredit legitimate concerns as “far right extremism.” If the activists and media professionals dismissively reframing stories like this were as empathetic as they claim they are, they would readily perceive how off-base and off-putting these rhetorical moves are and stop. That they persist nevertheless is very revealing.
Despite their self-flattering rhetoric about empathy, many Groupthinkers struggle to grasp that other people might have legitimate concerns about their policy failures. They have spent so long telling themselves they’re on the “right side of history,” and that their perceived opponents are nothing but fascist bigots, that they reflexively reject even glaring evidence to the contrary. To be sure, leftists’ false sense of moral and intellectual superiority predates the counter-disinfo industry that sprang up after Trump’s first presidential victory. But this industry’s language and technology gave left-leaning political obsessives new rhetorical, mental and digital tools to dismiss people and ideas that threaten their worldview. Though that industry has been in retreat over the last couple of years after several high-profile exposés and some visible groups disbanding, it’s still operating, and its impact on partisan thought is still very powerful.
Worse, the opportunity cost of spending years building a pseudo-academic pretext to downplay or delegitimize certain viewpoints has helped cultivate an increasingly hard-headed and hard-hearted kind of partisan, many of whom still staff influential organizations, bureaucracies, and media outlets. The slanted conversations and coverage they generate — which doesn’t actually address a Thing itself, but polices and stigmatizes perceived opponents’ reactions to said Thing — trains their own partisans to stop thinking critically about serious events and adopt their preferred narrative instead. Intentionally or not, their efforts to counter malign influence operations have devolved into a malign influence operation of their own, training their own operatives and audiences to dismiss politically inconvenient information when shared by the ‘wrong’ people, and to feel justified in debanking, deplatforming, or even physically attacking people accused of spreading ‘wrongthink.’
Seeing this devolution up close is a big part of what drove me away from the Left, and opened my eyes to the corrosive impact of ideological groupthink on my own ‘side,’ not just across the aisle. I entered the professional Left, and the counter-disinfo industry in particular, with an earnest desire to combat bigotry and “racialized disinformation.” Once the first wave of researchers and strategists had trained people to stop accidentally amplifying alleged disinformation, I was often hired to teach people how to craft and amplify their own, better messages. As a contractor working with influential counter-disinfo networks to train partner organizations on effective response tactics, I spent the better part of two years regularly sitting in on briefings held by researchers tracking alleged disinformation.
Week after week, they’d report out trending topics from their daily scans, frequently alerting me to horrible incidents I’d never heard of despite subscribing to lots of news outlets. An undocumented immigrant who raped and killed a girl. A healthy young athlete who unexpectedly dropped dead of heart failure. Parents and kids testifying at school board meetings, outraged about a sexual assault coverup or quoting pornographic dialogue from books in grade school libraries. Every time, the stories would be discussed solely in terms of their assumptions about why it animated conservative commentators and social networks: “Right-wingers are riled up about x story because it fits y narrative.”
On these calls, no one discussed the substance of these stories. No one expressed concern for the people involved. No one interrogated why those narratives existed in the first place, or openly considered that people might be legitimately frustrated by authorities’ inadequate responses to serious questions and situations. Each life, each story was flattened and compiled into data reports to be shared among partner organizations and campaigns, so they could strategize around how to counter “problematic” narratives. While sometimes they’d report out actual hoaxes or half-truths or doctored footage or photos, often the stories or information being shared were true, just politically inconvenient for our almost-entirely left-leaning coalition. Some of the stories would come and go, never escaping their digital quarantine. Stickier stories, ones that couldn’t be contained or disappeared, would eventually appear in legacy media outlets repackaged as trend pieces accusing popular conservatives like Kirk of spreading “anti-immigrant sentiment,” “COVID conspiracies,” “anti-LGBTQ hate” or “book banning.”
I often felt uncomfortable with the cold, cynical way they’d discuss even the most gut-wrenching stories. I was even more uncomfortable the more I learned about their monitoring efforts. Years earlier, when I was an org staffer receiving these kinds of monitoring reports (and still fully bought into lefty groupthink), I just believed researchers when I was told the reliably partisan skew of their reports was merely a consequence of those people sharing more misinformation. But once I got a closer look, I could see that they constructed their tools to focus almost exclusively on their political opposition.
For a while I tried to ignore my misgivings about the research side of things and just focus on training. I told myself that no coalition is perfect, and I could still be helpful by teaching partner groups how to be better advocates for good public policy. But as I spent time on Signal threads with those partners, I saw their disdain toward their fellow Americans. And especially as I watched their organizations deploy many of the manipulation tactics I warned against on their own audiences, I couldn’t keep lying to myself about what I was involved in. Then came the day we met with an organization seeking help spreading what I knew to be false information about gender drugs and surgeries. That, as I’ve explained before, was when I started eyeing the exits.
It’s also when I started digging even deeper into the stories and perspectives my then-peers so often dismissed, and started listening to many of the people they demonized. And it’s when I saw for myself that some of these alleged right wing bogeymen were multifaceted, thoughtful people raising important questions and sharing worthwhile challenges to my (mostly former) viewpoints. After spending years among thought-policing “friends” and colleagues, it was refreshing to listen to people like Charlie Kirk, who marshaled logic and evidence for their ideas instead of manipulating people into ideological compliance through credentialist appeals to authority, identity-based pity, and shaming.
Contrary to what I’d heard about Kirk in particular, he wasn’t hateful. He simply dared to share arguments, information, and questions that effectively exposed the hollowness of many of the Left’s arguments. And he was bold enough to do it face-to-face, instead of hiding behind a computer screen trying to silence people in the name of “justice.” Even in his death, he is exposing hypocrisy on the Left, as many of the same people who called his calm, respectful debates “violent” now downplay, justify, or celebrate the actual violence that killed him.
In their secularish quest to absolve themselves of the sins they see in their political opposition, many Groupthinkers project their own politically-obsessed ways of thinking onto others, or deny their vulnerability to negative tendencies common to all people. But they are the ones who consider every news story or trending incident in light of its narrative utility (or lack thereof). They are weakening democracy and due process by policing what other people think, say, and do, all while normalizing cancellation, vandalism, riots, and assassinations. (Trying to keep people dependent on government assistance while claiming that same government is descending into fascism also blows my mind.) They are engaging in discrimination by upholding different standards for people’s behavior based on identity. And they are exacerbating bigotry by using pressure campaigns and digital censorship to aggressively enforce social taboos against discussing inconvenient truths, particularly truths about people groups they consider “oppressed.”
It shouldn’t be taboo to discuss whether Iryna Zarutska might still be alive if her killer had been in prison or an in-patient psychiatric facility. The impulse to hide or downplay certain incidents or statistics because bad actors might use these stories to fuel bigoted sentiment itself fuels that sentiment. The sad fact is, a small minority of men commit the majority of violent crimes in this country, and black and brown men are wildly over-represented among them. (And no, they’re not all there ‘cause TeH sYsTeM framed them. They’re there because they’ve hurt people, likely more than they’ve even been charged or tried for given how underreported interpersonal violence tends to be.) These are largely personal and cultural failures that progressives have enabled by stigmatizing out-group cultural critiques as racist, accusing in-group members who make them of engaging in “respectability politics1”, and subjecting our communities to people who have repeatedly demonstrated they are a danger to themselves and others, including repeat offenders who had no right to be in this country in the first place2.
Lefty partisans’ refusal to deal with stuff like this is reviving bigotries that would have all but died out by now. (They’re also inventing brand new bigotries by manufacturing new identity groups, but for the sake of kicking just one hornet’s nest today, I’ll leave that alone for now.) For starters, they’ve shown people that they have given special status to so-called “victim” groups, and demonstrated that they will uphold that ideological stance at the expense of actual victims. That dynamic creates a sad but logical incentive for people to protect themselves by avoiding members of groups leftists have enabled to prey on others with impunity, particularly in jurisdictions where progressive Democrats monopolize political power.
Worse, when they discuss crime disparities, they often invoke long-dead injustices like slavery and Jim Crow, or the (let’s be real: typically minor and infrequent) discrimination black and brown folks face today. By doing so, leftists unfairly drag all of us law-abiding, business-minding black people under the same cloud of suspicion hanging over the handful of folks who actually commit serious crimes. (I have never seen mainstream conservatives like Charlie Kirk say anything nearly as racist as the notion that black people should get a pass when we riot, or beat, rob, and kill people because our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were enslaved. But that’s basically what many leftist arguments boil down to when stripped of their academic jargon.)
So when “nice,” agreeable people see others get cancelled, deplatformed, or even shot while raising valid questions and counterpoints to easily observable cultural dynamics, their silence leaves a vacuum to be filled by the actual bad actors this industry purportedly set out to suppress. Then “nice” people start listening to them, because they’re the only ones speaking frankly about troubling trends in society. That’s an unforced error with grave consequences.
The idea that people who repeatedly commit crimes shouldn’t be free to murder people in public spaces was a consensus viewpoint until very recently in American history. That anyone would think to link this view to a “MAGA crime narrative” merely reflects how severely Groupthink, Inc. has warped its participants’ minds, and how radically they’ve distorted our public conversations.
But if there’s any upside to the horrific events we’ve seen recently, it’s that they’ve further exposed the rot in our political culture. When I see people excusing, justifying, and even celebrating violence (and in the name of “empathy” for the “oppressed,” no less!) I’m briefly tempted to give up hope for my state and country — until I remember that there but for the grace of God, I used to be.
Five years ago, I might have been one of these people who tried to downplay the circumstances of Zarutska’s death, or felt a bit of relief or even laughter upon hearing someone took a shot at President Trump or killed a popular conservative influencer like Kirk. There are some people who will stay stuck in this darkness, fully convinced their evil thoughts and callous actions are morally justified. There are some who believe the Irynas and Charlies of society are acceptable sacrifices for their ideological purity.
But every day, I’m seeing more reminders that there are less of them than there are of us, even in blue states like mine. I’m seeing more people waking up to the rot within their ideological camps, and declaring their independence from groupthink. (I’m excited to share conversations with some of them right here and on YouTube in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned!) Here’s praying we don’t let the thought police, or fear of the assassin’s veto, stop us from seeking, debating, and defending worthwhile ideas, no matter who finds them inconvenient.
Only an intellectually and morally bankrupt culture can find a way to stigmatize respectability. But I’ll save the rest of my thoughts about “Politically Black” racism for a another post. Can y’all tell I’m so over this foolishness?!?
Though we’re still waiting for all the facts in her case, I think it’s important to mention Dacara Thompson, a 19-year-old who was murdered (and based on her state of undress when found plus earwitness accounts, likely raped) around the same time Iryna was killed. The man accused of killing then discarding her in a river was here illegally, had previously been arrested for DUI, but was released. Prince George’s County, MD has policies limiting cooperation with immigration officials.