Proud Boys, Cults, & Subscribing

Reporting from militias to salmon streams, this journalist needs your help.

*Good news. The rally Sunday by right-wing brawlers the Proud Boys was a flop.  They promised to summon thousands to take back Portland and kick antifa’s ass. Instead,  a couple hundred appeared in a remote park. They prayed, waved flags, and denounced “domestic terrorism” while threatening the press with baseball bats and kicking one videographer to the ground. The presence of some heavily armed paramilitaries, faces hidden, bodies covered in ammo, black rifles, and armor, was a window into our future: the gunmen are already here. Political volence begins with the threat of violence. There’s a reason Oregon, like many states, has strong laws against brandishing weapons and threatening people. Because it used to end in butchery all the time. Young men using guns to respond to threats they feel—that’s so 1870s. 

*Bad news: it’s time for a paid subscription. You can continue to receive a short version of this letter, free, with summaries of my reporting on authoritarianism, and steps we can take. But (do it!) hit “Subscribe,”and for $7 a month, you get the finshed product: detailed narrative journalism about our crisis, weekly. And crucially, only paid subscribers get the supporting media—my video reports (like this follow up to my Columbia River salmon piece, below), links to my articles, my photo stream from international journalism, and a behind-the-scenes feed of what reporting looks like, and How I Got That Story. I promise to spend the money wisely. 

*Van Badham in the Guardian also has good insight on how to reach the many Americans who prefer convenient delusions to reality. When they go low, you go high. Patience, compassion, and leading questions are more powerful than insults, mockery, or evidence. “Arguing the facts of an issue can have the effect of entrenching conspiracy attitudes,” she writes. True believers “dig in to save face and defend their public social status.” And insulting or belittling them makes them double down on their own feelings. 

She specifically addresses the #QAnon cult, but you see this same dynamic at work with pro-Trump vigilantes who imagine ANTIFA looters and arsonists everywhere, or Proud Boys in pickups who think they just defeated domestic terrorism. 

(Speaking of vigilantes, I’m happy to report the Sheriff of Multnomah County charged three men for making the illegal roadblock in Corbett, OR, that I encountered and described two weeks ago.) 

The Guardian continues with recommendations:  

1. Don’t share the original content; repeating it only spreads it. Use your own words and memes rather that let social media amplify their propaganda. I’d add the idea of the “truth sandwich.” If you have to describe their lie, wrap it on both sides with a statement of what’s true. People remember beginnings and endings.  

2.instead of online insults, use private conversation “not to argue facts, but to encourage doubts. Believers in these things inherently have doubts – even if they’re buried deep – because verifiable proof doesn’t exist to support the cult’s claims. Try questioning responses, such as: “There seem to be a lot of holes in this theory, don’t you think?”, “I’m not sure we should really trust an anonymous source, are you?”, “Don’t you think there’d be more evidence out there if this were true?”

3. “Experts recommend affirming the “higher selves” of believers. It’s actually lovely to think your cousin is stirred to rescue children from the clutches of blood-drinking paedophiles, even if they don’t actually exist. Verbally acknowledging this is an important way of steering someone’s good emotional values into a logical rejection of the cult.”

* Here, one time only, is the kind of behind the scenes material and cute fish video you get with a paid subscription. In November, I published an article and Harpers called the $68,000 fish, about salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest. Part of this delightful project is running out to the gorge of the Columbia to check the annual returns. This is why I love reporting: