David Leavitt is a Twitter resistance weirdo who has amassed more than a quarter-million followers by regularly tweeting out boilerplate Trump hatred and moralizing Democratic platitudes. He’s also a self-identified “award-winning journalist” but is probably most famous for getting big mad at retail store managers who won’t acquiesce to his bullshit and then posting about them online. He’s pretty deranged, even by internet weirdo standards. Whatever pays the bills, I guess!
Ben Shapiro needs much less of an introduction, but this paragraph will be much longer, both as a kind of meta-joke about his own style of presentation and also the inexplicably outsized place he holds in the culture. He is a podcaster and author and short little fellow who talks very quickly in his little chipmunk voice about why conservatism is good and how liberals are out of their fucking minds. He (or his social media handlers and fans) found a very successful formula back in the Obama years for racking up Facebook and YouTube impressions with the “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS _______” formula. In these videos, Ben Shapiro gets a mealy-mouthed question from an undergraduate at a speaking gig or a dumb cable news interviewer and then proceeds to UTTERLY DEMOLISH the DISGUSTING HYPOCRISY of the opposing position, usually by asserting a number of unrelated and noncontroversial facts, segueing into a couple of meaningless tautologies, non-sequiter’ing abruptly back to the subject at hand, and concluding that the other side is Actually Evil. The rhetoric is controlled and hectic and voluminous, somehow both restrained and hysterical at the same time, concluding with a sputtering, bemused disbelief that anyone could possibly believe anything else in the face of this LOGIC and REASON. He and the website he co-founded, The Daily Wire, regularly post the most-seen and shared items on Facebook. Sometimes he’s right about things, sometimes he’s wrong about things, he’s rarely arguing in good faith, and he’s always absolutely certain about everything.
Those are the the two distasteful players in this blog, but who they are is largely beside the point—here, they represent two sides of a culture war that is meant to be intractable, unwinnable, and incessant. That there is a rather dramatic disparity in their relative cultural gravity doesn’t particularly matter, either—kinda the whole point of social media (or at least Twitter (and via Twitter, often cable news)) is to flatten the reality of influence-disparity such that any one idiotic tweet or statement can be said to represent WHAT [THE OTHER SIDE] BELIEVES entirely. Is this good? Of course not!
After the Texas abortion law went into effect on September 1, that David Leavitt fellow posted the above tweet, which Shapiro subsequently “dunked on” with his own, in the parlance of our times. Again, the particular idiocy on display here by the particular players is beside the point, so I’m not going to engage with the particulars on their own terms. But look at the absolute truth of each one of them, if you can—the entirely insulated, irrefutable truth of each of those statements, as understood from the perspective of the tribes to which they are addressed.
“It’s now easier to obtain an assault rifle in Texas than it is to get an abortion,” is a statement that has been true more or less forever outside of a ten year run starting in 1994, and the abortion law that went into effect on September 1 did nothing to change that reality. And within the bubble to whom Leavitt’s tweet is being expressed, it’s true on a deeper, more symbolic level—Leavitt expects his audience to feel a combination of sad irony and impotent outrage at this fact. There’s a lot of shaking my damn head energy in the post. Leavitt knowns that he does not have to communicate to his tribe that “obtaining an assault rifle” is bad—they know it is. Nor does he have to communicate that it should be easy to get an abortion—this is an established truth for his tribe. That the precise opposite of those priors is true for the other side is a feature of this construction, of course.
Outside Leavitt’s intended audience, in the opposing tribe, the original tweet is just as true, but the different set of pre-existing prior beliefs allows for the second-order truthiness of it to have just as much symbolic resonance, too. And that’s before we get to Shapiro’s tweet, which does almost exactly the same thing as Leavitt’s, relying on the known prior beliefs of his intended audience to imbue the statement with any real meaning at all. All of which obscures the fact that in terms of the practical bottom line truth value of the initial statement, nothing has actually changed. The Leavitt crowd can wail their laments about losing ground in the culture war as the Shapiro crowd takes an equally self-righteous victory lap, all of them aggrieved and huddling among their tribe—and neither has addressed the material changes that took place in Texas overnight, which were actually quite substantial.
Shapiro’s statement is a brief masterpiece in intra-tribe communication and cross-tribe trolling, written in such a way that will allow people who agree with his priors to vigorously agree while those on the other side can point in horror that he’s got it precisely backwards. And the absoluteness of the statement makes it difficult to even consider the possibility of nuance, the possibility that this is not an either/or situation but an intensely complex problem of competing rights through which it is actually very hard to draw an ethical through-line. “But he just did it! He drew the ethical through-line! In fewer than 280 characters,” your brain tells you, because you’re looking at it right there on the page. It’s obfuscation by oversimplification, a Sithian dichotomous absolutism that pretends to understanding, but actually makes truth-getting even harder. You lose simply by trying to engage with it—it is specifically engineered to elicit bad faith rejoinders, because it is itself a bad faith rejoinder to the original meaningless true-enough platitude.
Incredibly, and obviously, this is just kinda how people talk online. None of the above is new or interesting or revelatory. I only even felt I had to write it up because of how clear an example these tweets are of accomplishing the opposite of what social media tells us it wants to accomplish. Facebook wanted to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Twitter says they “serve the public conversation.” Great plan, folks! Turns out, instead, you built a machine perfectly designed to encourage people to ceaselessly snipe at each other from the safety of their respective tribes. How is the public conversation served when the concept of “getting ratioed” is fundamental to the discourse on the platform? A user is meant to feel humiliated when their post has a list of comments or quote-tweets that dramatically outnumbers how many thoughtlessly tossed-off likes it was able to generate. The whole thing is centered around making posts that your curated bubble likes without qualification. Serving public conversation! By snarky screenshots and quote-tweets, because we've got it all figured out, but look at these other assholes!
And this is what we're teaching our politicians we care about! All the positive reinforcement they get from the algorithm feeds into the actual things they actually say and do in government. So we get a United States senator tweeting #LiberalsAreRacists because he knows it will do great numbers, nevermind that only 39% of his constituency identifies as conservative. He's doing this at the same time that he is promising to take no responsibility for governing whatsoever. Why? Because social media and cable news tell him all the time that he must listen only to those who already like him, because the other side only ever expresses absolute contempt. Why else? Because he's a fucking weird squid, sure! Ted Cruz sucks, but at least some of that suck has to do with the awful environment the squid is swimming in. And we get a bunch of journalists sharing a video of a stupid Daily Wire podcast offering the hot take that Obama killed Rock and Roll. Is this an incredibly stupid take? Of course it is! But thirty years ago it would have gone out over the talk radio airwaves and died forty seconds later. Now it's immortalized and passed around 4000 twitter feeds to make one team feel better about their own self-evident superiority. A whole media ecosystem devoted to exploiting the awful human instinct to point and laugh. Get a load of these assholes, we're all saying, all the time, in service of the public conversation.
Social media is a perfect polarization machine because it is easier to believe the things you already believe than to believe you are wrong, and because almost nobody On There cares about anything besides demonstrating their rightness. It is not cooperative or collaborative or "serving the public conversation" because it's not a place for getting shit done, it's a place for fucking around with your friends and dumping on your enemies. It is shitty and dehumanizing because of choices made by its users and encouraged by its engagement algorithms. Our use of it encourages our leaders to be worse at everything in "real life" because every public utterance is just waiting to be turned into a tweet (or a cable news soundbite that will then be turned into a tweet) and weaponized against one side or another. And it matters! Not because it actually matters, of course, by any reasonable definition of something mattering. It matters because these people are, crucially, among the most terminally online people in the world, desperately overconcerned with their public image. It matters because it's the water they're swimming in, these weirdo fucking squids, no matter how many of the rest of us are able to look away. And it's not ever, ever going to get better.
