A little too much coffee and Roberts' Rules.
by Jon
Esther O’Reily asks ‘what happened to David French?’ and talks about how he was subjected to racist attacks:
there really was an alt-right. Case in point, look at what happened to David French: For the sin of adopting a black child, he and his family were deluged with verbal abuse, vile memes, and even death threats.
I do sometimes wonder what David French’s inbox and timeline look like. And the same for people like Rudy Giulianni, or Russell Moore.
I am just important enough to get a one-a-month missive from an anonymous European mailserver. It knows a lot about Southern Baptist controversies, and tries to make me angry about various cucks or wokes or anti-whites or something. But the English is … off. And they don’t quite know the teams; they make mistakes like thinking fundamenalists would be embarassed by creationism. And every once in awhile, they try to sell me on neo-paganism.
Altogether, I conclude somebody wants to polarize Southern Baptists. It could be an actual white supremacist group. But I can imagine a cubicle farm in a foreign country, with teams organized around American political groups. It doesn’t make money, and it doesn’t make religious sense – but it makes a little political sense.
You wouldn’t think readers believe this obviously terrible stuff. But then Brent Hobbs posted one of those emails as an example of the “friends” of the Conservative Baptist Network. Karen Prior chimed in to suggest she was never aware of a CBN connection to these supremacists before, as if this might now show a connection. No one seemed to question whether they’d been duped by an obvious disinformation and polarization campaign.
There are Baptist critics of Russell Moore and Ed Litton, but I bet nearly zero of them are dabbling in neo-paganism, social darwinism, and actual white supremacy, combined with the time, stamina and technical knowledge necessary to send years of monthly emails using central-European spamhubs. They don’t make sense as an actual political effort. But they do convince some gullible members of SBC Twitter that their critics are the kind of people supported by white supremacists.
Polarization accomplished.
Who else gets this kind of treatment? I have heard hints that prominent Evangelical parents of nonwhite children received a steady attack from the “alt-right” in 2015 and 2016. Let me be clear, I believe there is an alt-right, and it could be a danger to the poorly discipled. But I don’t believe it is compatible with Evangelical faith, and it doesn’t have much of a foothold in our churches. But when the SBC began to debate a resolution against the alt-right in 2017, several denominational leaders said they were getting lots of online abuse. How many racists would develop the deep knowledge of Southern Baptist politics necessary to target those leaders?
Given the state of the art, it would probably take too much time and effort – even for a state actor – to shape the inboxes of the massess; Google’s spam filter is pretty good. But a bunch of Twitter-facing evangelical leaders seem to get regular email from neo-fascists. And those leaders seem ready to believe the emails.
What if the inboxes of our leaders don’t reflect reality? Our leaders may not watch Fox News for hours a day; but they might spend hours a day in their email, discipled by their messages.
If you were determined to divide and polarize important American political groups, could you shape David French’s worldview through his inbox, texts, and DMs? Or Russell Moore’s?
And if you could get key evangelical leaders to loose faith in evangelicals, what would happen?