by Matthew Syed
On his very first day, he bumped into Juan Elias, an immigrant from Peru with a wispy beard and long sideburns. Derek had hardly spent any time with anyone Hispanic before. They chatted at length about life and more. A few days later, he started playing guitar in the courtyard, and noticed a student wearing a yarmulke sitting down to listen. Matthew Stevenson was the only Orthodox Jew on campus and he started to sing along, smiling.
Derek took the decision early on to conceal his political identity. He was careful never to talk about politics, or at least never to offer any tells as to his true beliefs. He didn’t want to become socially isolated at college. He would spend time with his fellow students in the evening, chatting about history, or languages, or music, then leave his dorm early in the morning to call in to his radio show, broadcasting far right sentiments on the airwaves. Nobody twigged what was going on. Saslow writes: ‘On the air, he repeatedly theorised about the “criminal nature of blacks” and the “inferior natural intelligence of blacks and Hispanics”. He said President Obama was “anti-white culture”, a “radical black activist” and “inherently un-American”.’
After a year, Derek’s views had not budged. The trust filters were taking the strain of sustaining his extremist ideology. He remained the great hope of the far right. Besides, the perennial slur that he had no mind of his own had always bugged him. He was pleased that his convictions had remained robust in such an alien environment. ‘Derek hated the suggestion that he’d simply been indoctrinated with his family’s racial convictions; no idea was more insulting to him.’ After his first semester, he flew to Germany for a four-month sabbatical in an immersive language school. He visited his godfather David Duke, and continued to read up on racial ideologies. He was three months into his visit when he logged in to the student blog back at New College to chat with friends and to catch up on the news.
A few days previously, at 1.56 a.m., a student studying political extremism had come across a photo of a youngster with long red hair and a cowboy hat on a far right website. He was stunned. ‘Have you seen this man?’ he posted, with a picture beneath it. ‘Derek Black. White supremacist, radio host . . . New College student?’
Within hours, it had become the most blogged post in the history of the college.
Black knew what was coming. When he returned to college, he was ostracised by former friends. ‘I just want this guy to die a painful death along with his entire family; is that so much to ask’, one said on the forum. Another wrote: ‘Violence against white supremacists will send a message that white supremacists will get beat up. That’s very productive.’ He was confronted by fellow students leaving a party, and had to be dragged away by someone fearing he was about to get punched. People vandalised his car. Others shouted expletives. At one point, students shut down the school for a day in protest at Derek’s presence.
To Derek, this merely confirmed what he had learned from Duke and his father. The liberal establishment was out to get the far right. They couldn’t bear alternative opinions. They wouldn’t even allow them to be expressed. They were the bigots and censors. It was white nationalists who had the scientific and moral arguments on their side. Black showed his defiance by organising an international conference for members of Stormfront with the theme: ‘Verbal Tactics for Anyone White and Normal’. ‘Come and learn how to stand strong against the enemy’s abuse,’ he announced on radio. He booked a dozen keynote speakers – including his father and Duke, two of the most eloquent advocates of white nationalism.
Derek ‘obsessed over each detail, from the colours of the conference logo to the sandwiches in the sack lunches’. Even before he started his speech to open the conference, the assembled extremists from Europe, Australia and Canada stood to applaud. He found himself in the bosom of the community.
‘Gen-o-cide’, was David Duke’s opening remark. ‘Say it with me now. This is the murder of our very genes. Repeat that over and over.’ Don spoke last, to yet more resounding applause, Derek coming to stand alongside him on the stage.
‘Staying on the genocide message demoralises/embarrasses anti-whites,’ Derek wrote on the Stormfront message board. ‘Stay on the offensive, because you are right.’ His destiny as the future force for white nationalism seemed surer than ever.
Then, a few days later, everything changed.
V
Matthew Stevenson has black hair, a short beard and bright eyes. His manner is calm, his face friendly. He grew up in Miami, Florida, started attending the Kabbalah Centre at the age of eight, and grew in the Jewish faith. At fourteen, he started wearing the yarmulke. His upbringing was, at times, tough, not least because of his mother’s alcoholism. She attended a treatment facility, and he accompanied her to AA meetings from a young age. ‘It was a huge education. You meet all sorts of people: rich, poor, white, black. You hear incredible stories of how people have reached rock bottom, but managed to find a way back. You develop empathy.’
Matthew is the Orthodox Jew who Derek encountered on his first day at New College, wearing a yarmulke, and singing along to his guitar in the courtyard. I interviewed Matthew on a sunny winter afternoon and found him to be quizzical and thoughtful, a young man who had learned a great deal at those AA meetings, not least people’s capacity for change.
‘It was quite difficult to process that information,’ he tells me about the day he found out about Derek’s white supremacist beliefs. ‘When we first met, I had no idea about his ideology. We just enjoyed chatting together and hanging out. We weren’t best friends, but we knew each other and liked one another’s company. When the news broke, I was as shocked as everyone else.’
Matthew was already aware of the Stormfront website. Like other students worried about the rise of the far right, he had surfed the site to try to make sense of the sentiments driving the rising tide of hate crimes. ‘When I heard the news about Derek I went back to the site, and looked to find his postings. It was pretty sobering.’ One of the posts from Derek that Matthew uncovered said: ‘Jews are NOT white. They worm their way into power over society. They manipulate. They abuse.’
Many of Matthew’s fellow students rejected Derek instantly, while others verbally abused him. The student forum was ablaze with shock and scandal for many weeks and months. But Matthew pondered Derek’s upbringing, the virulent culture of white nationalism in which he had been socialised, and reflected upon just how easily any young person might end up with racist views in that milieu. Matthew says:
I knew that it was very unlikely he’d spent a lot of time around other people. He didn’t have a lot of black family friends or Jewish family friends. I couldn’t put my hand on my heart and say that I wouldn’t have become a white nationalist in that subculture. I felt that the right thing to do was to reach out to him. I knew from AA how people can change, often dramatically.
Every Friday, Matthew hosted a Shabbat dinner for friends. It had started out as a small group, but had grown to include Christians and atheists, and was something of a fixture in the social life of the tiny campus. Often, up to fifteen people would pack into his dorm room to eat honey and mustard-glazed salmon and challah bread. It was a wonderful way to build friendships and share ideas.
Just a few days after the Stormfront conference, with Derek now back on campus, Matthew sat down to write a text message to the campus’s white supremacist. ‘Hey,’ the message said. ‘What are you doing on Friday night?’ Matthew followed up on the Friday afternoon: ‘Looking forward to seeing you tonight.’ Derek, more isolated than ever before, accepted the invitation. ‘I wasn’t getting many social invitations at the time!’ he later said. Matthew recalls:
At first, it was a little awkward. Neither of us knew how it was going to go. I had asked the other two guests [most of the usual attendees had refused to turn up because of Derek’s presence] not to bring up politics. After a few minutes, it flowed smoothly . . . He is an intelligent guy. He came the next week, and the next. Frankly, I enjoyed his friendship.
Matthew
avoided politics. He realised that such a hot topic could lead to sharp exchanges, not least with the other students, many of whom had started to return to the weekly dinner after boycotting Derek’s first appearance. Matthew doubted that such an exchange would change anyone’s views; at least, not at first. He knew that before a meaningful dialogue could take place, he needed to establish something else. Trust.
They chatted about early Christianity, languages, monasticism. Derek was consistently impressed with the scope of Matthew’s knowledge. Matthew, for his part, thought that Derek was one of the smartest guys he had met. These were two of the top students in the college, and they were building an ever-stronger connection. They laughed together. They learned together. More attendees started to return to the Shabbat dinner and began forming bonds with Derek, too. Brick by brick, the epistemic wall was being dismantled.
When one evening Alisson Gornik, another attendee at the dinners, brought up his political views when they were chatting on their own, Derek listened. They discussed the foundations of white nationalism: the idea that blacks are, on average, less intelligent than whites, that they are more predisposed to crime, that there are immutable biological differences between races. Derek believed in the robustness of these pseudo-scientific foundations. He was sincere when he said that he thought that minorities should be repatriated. He believed that it was better for blacks and whites.
Alisson came back with scientific papers that challenged the statistical basis of these racist claims. Derek had heard of such papers before, but had never engaged with them. Why bother with the duplicitous data introduced by an untrustworthy liberal and scientific establishment? Why spend time on information that has been rigged to obtain prejudged results?
Now, he found himself reading them with a more open mind. He saw papers that showed that IQ differences could be explained by cultural biases. He read about stereotype threat, how first-generation immigrant children performed better at school, on average, than American students, about the basis of human genetic variation and its implications.
He had long sincerely argued that whites were discriminated against in modern America, but now found himself face to face with data on the lack of black representation in state government, how whites are more likely to be promoted than equally qualified blacks, how blacks are twice as likely to be suspended from school for the same offence, twice as likely to work for the minimum wage in the same jobs, significantly less likely to be invited for interview even with identical qualifications.
Was this really a country rigged in favour of minorities and against whites?
Derek’s life, his childhood memories, his sense of identity, was bound up with white nationalism. So were his family, his friends, his in-group. But the foundations of his beliefs were being dismantled, not because he had never been exposed to contrary evidence, but because he hadn’t previously engaged with it. Slowly but surely, he came to the realisation that the evidence didn’t support the ideology of white nationalism, even if he knew that admitting so publicly would cause ructions across the movement, and jeopardise his relationships, most significantly with his mum and dad. One evening, he sat down and started to type:
A large section of the community I grew up in believes strongly in white nationalism, and members of my family whom I respect greatly, particularly my father, have long been resolute advocates for that cause. From a young age I observed my dad sacrifice dearly for his commitment – a conviction stemming from nowhere else than ardent resolve in the rightness of the cause. I was not prepared to risk driving any wedge in those relationships and I did not believe that was necessary.
The number of changes in my beliefs during the past few years, however, has amounted to a shift that I think needs to be addressed. It is impossible to argue rationally that in our society, with its overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else, racial equity programs . . . represent oppression of whites . . . Particularly bizarre to me is the determination of Jewish social domination . . . It is an advocacy that I cannot support, having grown past my bubble, talked to the people I affected, read more widely, and realized the necessary impact my actions had on people I never wanted to harm.21
He then found the email address of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that had scrutinised the activities of his father for so many decades, and pressed send.
VI
The defining error in the contemporary analysis of the post-truth age has been the conflation of information bubbles and echo chambers. The former seeks to explain people’s extremist beliefs via distorted exposure. The idea is that when people are denied access to diverse views and evidence, they are more likely to cleave to extremist beliefs and ideologies. As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein argued in a highly influential essay:
Although millions of people are using the Internet to expand their horizons, many people are doing the opposite, creating a Daily Me that is specifically tailored to their own interests and prejudices . . . It is important to realize that a well-functioning democracy – a republic – depends not just on freedom from censorship, but also on . . . unsought, unanticipated, and even unwanted exposures to diverse topics, people, and ideas. A system of ‘gated communities’ is as unhealthy for cyberspace as it is for the real world.
Although this analysis sounded plausible, it struggled to survive empirical scrutiny. When the evidence showed that many at the extreme ends of politics are, in fact, exposed to contrary opinions, but seemed impervious to them, a new set of explanations arose. These focused on psychology (people are just too lazy to engage with contrary opinions) or accusations of downright irrationality. The idea seemed to be that many people had lost faith in truth itself.
Grasping the properties of echo chambers offers a far more plausible explanation. The problem isn’t that people have become trapped in cult-like information bubbles, nor has there been an epidemic of irrationality. No, the problem is more subtle. When outside sources of information have been systematically discredited, the belief-formation process itself undergoes distortion. In a world where trust is, in a certain sense, prior to evidence, this can be perilous. As Nguyen puts it:
Echo chambers are structures of strategic discrediting, rather than bad informational connectivity. Echo chambers can exist even when information flows well. In fact, echo chambers should hope that their members are exposed to media from the outside; if the right disagreement reinforcement mechanisms are in place, that exposure will only reinforce the echo chambers’ members’ allegiance. We ought not conclude then, from data that epistemic bubbles do not exist, that echo chambers also do not exist.
*
Derek Black and Matthew Stevenson are, today, two of the most eloquent voices arguing against political polarisation. Neither has a problem with divergent opinions, even powerfully argued ones, but they do worry about the character attacks, allegations of fake news, and broader breakdown of trust in political opponents. They have shared a stage on popular TV programmes, at youth events, even at corporations seeking to understand the post-truth age. Matthew – who is studying for a PhD in economics and mathematics – now helps a charity seeking to promote community understanding, while Derek is completing his PhD in history. Derek’s Twitter handle? ‘Unexpected advocate for antiracism’.
Derek’s life wasn’t easy after he emailed his statement to the SPLC retracting his political views. The storm in white nationalism was intense. Don, his father, initially thought the email had been sent by an imposter, and his mother didn’t want to speak to him. As for Duke, he conjectured that Derek was suffering from Stockholm syndrome – he had been effectively taken hostage by the liberal elite and was experiencing empathy for his captors. Derek has said:
Immediately, my dad called me and said he thought my email had been hacked because I had not shared with them this process. And so my condemning [white nationalism] came as a real shock to him. I am honestly not super proud of the way I did it. I feel like I should have warned him
and talked to him a bit more. And we had days of very intense conversations where it was not clear whether we would continue to speak at all.
Matthew tells me:
I think the first few months were the most difficult for Derek. His social life and identity were bound up in that ideology. It has taken a lot of readjustment. But Derek’s transformation confirmed what I learned when I went with my mother to Alcoholics Anonymous. People are capable of change, if you gain their trust. People start to listen to what you are saying when there is a real relationship, rather than just rejecting what you say out of hand.
That is the problem today: the mud-slinging that characterises competing political groups. This is true of many, not just the hard right . . . It makes dialogue almost impossible.
Philosophers have a particular term for serial assaults on personal integrity. The ‘ad hominem’ is defined by one reference source as ‘a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.’ A paper by the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka finds that the fallacy was first discussed by Aristotle in his book Sophistical Refutations.22 It has been a staple of philosophical treatment ever since, particularly in the work of John Locke. ‘It may be worth our while a little to reflect on . . . arguments that men, in their reasoning with others, do ordinarily make use of to prevail on their assent, or at least to awe them into silence,’ he writes.23