Hateland

by Daryl Johnson

  This conclusion, of course, completely contradicts the Las Vegas police report that Paddock was neither an extremist nor terrorist. While all the facts and testimony have yet to be confirmed, his misclassification would fit all too well into the many errors and shortcomings in the current approach to combatting extremism and terror. Further, there may be political reasons to not officially classify Paddock's actions as “domestic terrorism.” Doing so, would, once again, take away from the US government's perception of terrorism and call into question its counterterrorism strategy.

  There is a strong tendency to see violent attacks by non-Muslim whites not as terrorism, but as the random acts of maniacs. This is compounded by the disproportionate amount of resources spent on combatting Islamic extremism and the media coverage that gives 4.5 times as much exposure to acts of alleged Islamic extremism versus alleged non-Islamic extremism.

  There is also a real dearth of reporting provided to law enforcement about what extremism looks like today. While Paddock's lack of involvement with known extremist groups is significant, it's more important to note what specific ideologies he embraced and how critical those could have been to his motives.

  To a law enforcement officer reviewing the details of Paddock's case, his complaints about the government might fly under the radar because he didn't attack a government building. His huge gun collection might signify a kind of individual violent paranoia. And his obsession with hurricanes and FEMA might just seem like the mutterings of a madman. But, if the law enforcement officer is trained to recognize the behavior of modern domestic terrorist threats, Paddock suddenly looks like an archetypal paranoid, right-wing survivalist who shot up a bunch of innocent people in the hope of creating violent government overreach.

  But today, the intelligence and law enforcement communities don't receive the basic data and information about domestic extremism necessary to develop prevention strategies, new policies, possible legal remedies, and—perhaps most important of all—identification of potential warning signs to encourage public reporting to authorities.

  Finally, there is no clear universal definition of domestic terrorism. If, upon review, Paddock did fit into that definition, his fifty-eight victims would be considered victims of domestic terrorism—making it a lot harder to justify the insufficient resources available to prevent it. Without proper analysis, information sharing, and definitions, the people Paddock killed will continue to be considered victims of random gun violence, a much harder category to target.

  In February 2017, Cleveland Cavaliers all-star guard Kyrie Irving made a bombshell claim on ESPN: “This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat.”1 It was ridiculous, outlandish and, because of his huge media profile, changed the history of science—at least in certain isolated locations. One of the many critics of the basketball player's reckless conspiratorial suggestion was a middle school teacher named Nick Gurol. As a result of Irving's comments, Gurol said some of his students refused to believe that the earth was, in fact, round.2

  Over the next year, Irving responded with a string of evasive comments, first suggested that people do their own research, then later that he had been joking and misunderstood. In October 2018, he eventually apologized.3

  Irving was, however, not the only celebrity to endorse an idea that, for over a century, has been synonymous with someone who is backward and out of touch with reality. The previous year, rapper Bobby Ray Simmons Jr, AKA B.o.B, tweeted a picture of himself on an icy landscape with the skyline from two cities peeking out over the horizon: “The cities in the background are approx…16 miles apart…where is the curve ? please explain this.”

  Nor was Irving the most flamboyant flat earther. Over the past few years, a Californian named Mike Hughes has launched himself higher and higher across the Mojave Desert in a series of homemade rockets. He claims his ultimate goal is to get to an altitude where he can photograph the reputedly flat earth.4

  Although scientists have known the earth was round since at least the days of the Ancient Greeks, suspicions to the contrary have never been fully extinguished. Sometimes suggestions that, say, the earth is a disc ringed by a range of Antarctic mountains were even advanced by members of the scientific establishment.

  The Flat Earth Society was founded in the United States in 1956, eventually claiming thousands of members, but membership fell off—figuratively—in 2001 after its founder's death. But, as with so many other less innocuous-sounding conspiracy theories, social media and video platforms have revived flat earth beliefs.

  In 2009, an American named Daniel Shenton resurrected the Flat Earth Society.5 Google searches for “flat earth” have been spiking since 2015. In an April 2018 a YouGov poll, 2 percent of Americans claimed that have always believed the Earth was flat. A further five percent said they had thought the Earth was round but had recently had doubts.6 There are, apparently, more Americans on the fence about whether the planet is flat than there are residents of Florida.

  It's not so shocking, then, that Flat Earth Society conventions in the United States and UK have grown in recent years, drawing hundreds of people. It was also not much of a surprise that, when Mark Wilding, a correspondent for Esquire, attended the 2018 Birmingham, UK, flat earth conference, he found that nearly every flat earther “traced their conversion back to YouTube.”

  Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at Bristol University, also points to social media. “I don't think there is a belief absurd enough that you can't find 1,000 people sharing it on Facebook,” said Lewandowsky. “No one realised what was going to happen. It's just a sort of tragic consequence that our cognitive vulnerabilities are amplified by social media.”7

  Accident or not, the planet is now stuck with a massive social and information network that was supposed to put the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips but, instead, encourages people to ignore facts they dislike. Via Facebook forums, this same technological marvel also provides social reinforcement for their burgeoning but sometimes unpopular conspiracism—much the way it benefited ostracized white supremacists.

  As harmless as some absurd fringe theories seem, the current web-fueled explosion in “alternative facts” and hidden realities is dangerous. In the case of the flat earth, advocates have to be willing to refute centuries—if not millennia—of mainstream, established science. And, today, this is a chore that many people find incredibly easy.

  During a chatty back and forth on an NBA podcast, Kyrie Irving argued that, from his personal experience, the Earth seemed to be flat and that he was certain science was corrupt: “It's right in front of our faces,” he said, “They lie to us.”8 Likewise, Mike Hughes told NPR that, although he understood the science-based engineering he used to build his rockets—“aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust”—he didn't believe in science. “There's no difference,” he said, “between science and science fiction.”9 Hughes, and others, seemed to view science as an a la carte tray of knowledge.

  For the concluding event of the Birmingham conference, three PhD candidates in physics and astronomy had agreed to debate the attendees. The scientists, confident that their vast and specific knowledge would at least make some flat earthers reevaluate the arguments they had cobbled together off of YouTube, ended up completely shell-shocked by attendees’ resilience.

  The problem, of course, was that flat earth theory rests on the irrefutable antilogic of all conspiracy theories: any evidence contrary to one's position simply reveals an even larger conspiracy against one's privileged knowledge. So, instead of answering questions about orbital dynamics, the graduate students were assailed with questions like: “Why does NASA fake everything?”

  They also encountered an unshakeable faith that not one astronaut had ever been to space, that there were strings visible in the “faked” NASA videos of space walks, and that the technology didn't exist to land an expedition on the moon in 1969. If sane, educated people can
dismiss one form of established knowledge that flippantly, what else can they deny or choose to believe?

  According to Lewandowsky, people who are exposed to conspiracy theories, even if they don't buy into them, are subsequently less likely to believe other official accounts of events. Kyrie Irving, for example, also claimed that President John F. Kennedy was killed by the Federal Reserve.10 Of course, distrust of the banking establishment is often directed at, or a code word for, Jews. And truly steadfast resistance to establishment, consensus reality can also be a gateway to much uglier beliefs.

  A featured speaker in Birmingham speculated that the North Pole may have given the Nazis access to Hollow Earth. A long-time popular YouTube flat earther named Eric Dubay described himself as fighting the New World Order, another stand-in for Jews. Later, Dubay made his anti-Semitism more explicit, posting videos promoting the “holohoax.” In December 2017, he was banned from YouTube for hate speech.

  Robbie Davidson, the organizer of the 2017 Flat Earth International Conference in North Carolina, even uses the tendency—belief in one theory increases the belief in additional theories—as a tactic to recruit nonbelievers to flat earther-ism. If they aren't convinced that the moon landing was faked, Davidson said, then “start with 9/11, see where they're at on that scale.”

  Even in the least hateful theory rests the bigger idea of conspiracism: the truth as we know it has serious holes. Indeed, a show of hands at the Birmingham flat earth conference revealed that, for example, only one attendee believed the US and other Western governments weren't involved in planning the 9/11 attacks.

  However much scorn they heap upon these true believers, the media also can't keep away from these “kooks.” Following the Birmingham conference, its organizer Gary John Heather appeared on a British morning show called This Morning with two other flat earthers. The three were met with staunch disbelief by the hosts and, via satellite hookup, their theory was called “drivel” by a well-known scientist.

  Heather, of course, thought the event was a great success. By the measurements of conspiracists, he was right. As of February 2019, an edited clip of the show posted to YouTube has been viewed over 4.1 million times.11 Heather was very happy to have the media do his most difficult job: exposing new viewers to his loopy conviction.

  There is no moral equivalence between, say, flat earthers and rabid Holocaust deniers, but there are meaningful similarities. The ideas and membership of both groups multiply rapidly because of the particular media ecosystem that has developed since 2008, in which social media carries the weight of truth that used to be reserved for textbooks.

  This is the tattered state of mainstream truth and consensus around facts today. Rampant conspiracy theories and “alternative facts” permeate social media, establishment media, sometimes beginning with or being recycled by President Trump. The fantasy universes they inflate provide space for extremist ideologies to flourish. They justify baseless attacks on establishment institutions. At the most extreme, conspiracy theories may damage popular consensus so much that it is impossible for liberal democracy to exist.

  The first really damning look at the power of social media over mainstream institutions didn't begin until after the 2016 election. Even then, it wasn't focused so much on the success of the alt-right or extremism, but more generally in hijacking the new media ecosystem as Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. There continues to be debate over how much influence Russia hackers had in determining the ultimate outcome of the election. But the idea that a foreign intelligence operation could succeed in changing public opinion with a relatively cheap operation using American social media companies like Facebook and Twitter is stunning. It's also either a recognition of the power of social media or the fragility of US democracy.

  Following the deadly 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, however, the reality of social media's essential role in spreading extremism became unavoidable.

  There is no universal policy for what behavior will lead to being banned from a social media platform. What's more, doing so can create free speech concerns and hurt business. Despite dragging their feet, many companies have finally taken some useful steps to tamp down the spread of hateful extremism.

  After banning relatively few high-profile accounts between 2011 through October 2016, Twitter went on a purge. Beginning in August 2017, David Duke was suspended, followed by alt-right activist Baked Alaska, the American Nazi Party, white nationalist Jared Taylor, Mathew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker Party, Nordic Resistance Movement, and the alt-right leader of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes.

  Facebook and Google, both slow to act despite their massive role in spreading extremism, also announced plans to ferret out fake news on their platforms. Facebook banned the Proud Boys. Reddit cracked down on some threads that were racist or misogynist. The neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites Daily Stormer and Stormfront had their accounts eliminated by web hosting companies.

  Just as importantly, CNN pushed back on alt-right double speak, issuing a correction to a story about Richard Spencer that instead of “white rights activist,” they were referring to him more accurately as a “white supremacist.” The Associated Press likewise announced it will no longer use his illusive invention “alt-right,” instead preferring “white nationalist.”

  Websites like snopes.com also continue to do the valuable service of attempting to debunk fake news. But, despite the site's high profile, it's hard to make a dent in the massive amount of fake or misleading information in circulation.

  Probably the biggest name to suffer from an internet purge was Alex Jones. In 2018, in part because of his widely circulated claims that the Parkland High School shooting was a “false flag,” Jones was banned from several social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and his podcasts hosted by Spotify. But his ban also shows the limitations of online crackdowns.

  First, YouTube has a relatively forgiving “three strikes” policy in which an account can be banned if it posts material that violates community guidelines three times in three months. This means that Alex Jones, InfoWars, or his other outlets could potentially post two dangerous and conspiratorial videos that are widely shared by YouTube's massive platform before being taken down, and then just post slightly less inflammatory material until those two strikes disappear in a few months.

  This is exactly what happened in February 2018 when a video falsely accusing a Parkland high school student of being a “crisis actor” was viewed 200,000 times before YouTube removed it.12 The problem for YouTube is that, in part because of their own video referral analytics, conspiratorial material is really popular. It simply goes against social media's business model to ban those videos that are most useful to spreading extremist ideas.

  Even if you remove civil liberties concerns about infringing on free speech, the architecture of the internet simply resists shutting things down. Take, for example, efforts to remove Islamic extremist material. In 2018, eight European countries undertook a massive, coordinated operation to smash ISIS's online propaganda machine, what they called a “virtual caliphate.”13 Despite their efforts, the exercise soon turned into a game of whack-a-mole. One website, Amaq, kept on being taken down by providers but then reappeared at new addresses every few days. Both the internet and social media are set up to be incredibly accessible, so making new accounts is not hard. This made it relatively easy for Alex Jones to distribute his material under multiple names and accounts through podcasts, YouTube channels, Facebook pages, Twitter, and more. Permanently shutting down all of his outlets is a herculean task.

  Not only is it easy to create multiple accounts, but there are also scores of alternatives to the highest profile social media apps. Eventually, the efforts of European law enforcement caused Amaq to move its content to Telegram, an encrypted messaging service popular with Islamic extremists. The efforts were able to cut back the effectiveness of ISIS's online recruiting activities—potential recruits couldn't just enter “ISIS” into a
Google search bar. But encrypted apps like Telegram still allow already existing and core members to communicate and socialize. Similarly, far-right figures developed their own social media and web payment apps, like Gab, known as “Twitter for racists.”

  In April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress that his company's artificial intelligence tools would help them take down ISIS and al-Qaeda related terror content almost permanently, by detecting duplicate sites soon after they create accounts. Even as Zuckerberg was speaking, though, other terror groups on Facebook included Boko Haram, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. What's more, Facebook's business model is designed around making it easy for its 2.2 billion global users to connect with groups they are interested in.14 As a result, groups that were banned in one language could sometimes be located by searching in another. Because Facebook supports over a hundred languages, cracking down across all languages is a huge task.

  More importantly, neither the infrastructure of the web nor the economics of media are going away. The beauty of the web is its massive reach combined with low entry barriers. In other words, not only can Stormfront reemerge on the dark web, anyone can start the next Daily Stormer.

  The media's profit-motive also exists in constant tension with its public responsibility. And, despite being hated and distrusted by record percentages of Americans, the media is raking in profits off Trump. Not only have cable news networks boosted ratings by doing more Trump coverage, the traditional news broadcasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC have paid a price in ratings by doing the responsible thing: providing a wider range of stories like human interest, health, and local crime rather Trump 24/7.