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Notes -
The process in the 2010s went something like this:
The mainstream media, and sub-mainstream outlets, would craft an emotionally-poignant faux-tragedy out of an event related to race, eg Michael Brown.
Political operatives would boost these stories by sharing and responding to them online, treating these events as an intimate and civic tragedy of totalizing emotional importance. Some of these operatives just wanted Democrats to win, some of them wanted to grow their account. And some of them were actual die-hard antiracists (a tiny minority with a distinct origin in academia, coming out of Soviet anti-American Marxist tactics to weaken America).
Normal youth in America, absolutely starved of any civic or collective-religious ritual or belongingness, and not understanding anything, would imitate the operatives in mourning the faux-tragedies. This is something that seems important to do unless you know the game being played, and it is also cathartic in the same way watching true crime or a tragic drama is cathartic. This also brought them attention.
Because the faux-tragedies targetted the empathetic, the mourners were often young women, which means that young men would engage in it driven by pure desire to have sex with them.
With each additional sequence of catastrophizing an event, the grievance seems bigger and bigger and more legitimate and pressing, and the operatives etc were racing to develop the most “sticky” narrative because by making your message stickier you get more attention online, then your message was imitated, etc.
If you do this enough, “antiracist” becomes a desirable thing to signal within the cohort affected by this messaging. If you totalize the importance of racism, then you are also totalizing the importance of anti-racism. And it feels good to put that identity label in your bio.
It’s fun to draw a comparison between BLM-era ritual mourning and the Khameneist ritual mourning in Iran, and indeed there have even been cross-over episodes. They both have the intended aim of recruiting political allegiance by lazer-focusing on an ostensibly sorrowful, unjust, dramatic death, identifying with the suffering victim, and then embodying a sort of repented or amended spirit which comes out of it, especially within a space for collective effervescence.
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