The CNN analyst in the fresh post-debate shook me out of my stupor, talking about the white supremacist celebration online when Trump didn’t denounce them but instead requested they “stand by.” (CNN published an expansion of that observation from Paul Murphy days later.)
The fact that we can locate the white supremacist voice online troubles my expectations that there is still a shred of a covert ethos to bigotry. The mask off nature of white supremacy not only in the social structure of the ‘net but in observable culture and interpersonal interactions is a shock to the system.
I remember the covert way that the alt-right tried to recruit white teen boys and young men in 2015 and 2016 online. Sites like iFunny and formerly satirical subreddits were flooded with Trump memes, both praising and belittling him. At the same time, an increasing amount of memes were also overt about using racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and violence as the punchline. I had been on these sites for almost five years at this point, and this was new and disturbing. It made me face what substantiated the jokes I was laughing at, especially those with graphic images. That time period still taints how I look at image macro memes.
During the debate, the groupchat went off so much, echoing lines said and sentiments about the debate that the buzzing may have wore into the wood of my desk. The morning after, I woke up to a Twitter TL that ended at 10pm the day before, people mourning the death of (hope in) democracy.
For a couple of hours, I was reminded of the social media landscape at the beginning of mass quarantine in the US–the proliferation of “good byes” from television shows with live elements, the “stay inside” messages from online content creators before the uneasy silence of waiting it out. As I will bring up in a later update of “warewolf,” a five part series on my social and socially-isolating experiences with technology concluding this Halloween, I spent that silence mostly following the increase of COVID-19 cases in my home state of Minnesota and in Georgia, which I visited in February. The silence from that uneasy early quarantine time was so compelling that I almost changed the rhetoric of silence during that time to my thesis topic.
I know I try to abstain from the internet because I have mostly used the internet as a place where I can fall apart, not be the put-together responsible guy that my friends, family, and coworkers expect me to be but instead the thoughts-at-a-100-mph emotional being that I mold into appearing restrained. When I am shocked, my control mechanisms fail; my pressure-of-speech (and -writing) kicks in and fucks up my vocab, sentence structure, and clarity until I am a visible mess. To step away from communication media means taking the time to take care of myself and make the world meaningful to me again.
It’s an odd habit to have in a world that constructs meaning from media. Social media at this point is the fifth branch of government, providing a civic voice with minimal gatekeeping. Modern political discourse is linked to Twitter by Trump, Cruz, and AOC. Bernie Bros and Notorious RBGers have influenced how we imagine political allegiance and action that even in my actual thesis project, I discern Trump anti-fans from his conservative fandom. While the processes of legislation and execution are not changing, our cultural understanding–and stanning–of them is.
In the days following the debate, my husband has heard about the reaction to the debate from the perspective of his grandparents, Trump fans in the conservative fandom. They, of course, focused on Trump’s relationship with the moderator and Biden informed by Sean Hannity. They didn’t mention the content of the debate, nor Trump’s appeal to white supremacists.
In all fairness, I haven’t either. Overt versus covert comes to mind again.
My husband’s family, the home I fled to at the beginning of quarantine, the schools where I learned about meme sites, the long-time residences of my friends from the groupchat, all are located in a city that was home to a white supremacist group that was deemed no longer a present threat when I started kindergarten. I think back to how the school district covertly suspended a student for making a “I Want You” promotion with Uncle Sam in a white robe, or the kids who would “””””Roman””””” salute a morning ed. teacher without reprieve, or the distressed stories from the only Jewish teacher in the district. None of the teachers or administrators lived in the city. No one in my life admits to knowing about the group; I learned about it from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map. Yet in silence it still had a presence.
The week before the debate, in my ethnic and gender studies class, during the beginning of class where we usually share a current events story, the professor began a discussion on reproductive rights with the passing of RBG as a jumping off point. I was silent then, dismayed, fuming. A week before that, Dawn Wooten had blown the whistle on a genocidal act against Mexican women–hysterectomies in ICE camps. But Wooten is an unknown; she is not a figurehead. And Mexican women do not have a fandom.
As the silence began to break on my TL on September 29th, the voices of marginalized people became more visible. We told you so. You didn’t expect this? But expressions of the displaced and the oppressed are not as easy to read as dominant cultural narratives, hegemonic silences, and archontic analyses of power.