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Notes -
Election deflection, C-section abjection, complexion dejection, the Meccan deception
Psyops and "gotcha" questions as tools for exposing dishonesty, cowardice and ideological rifts
I
Jay Clayton is the US attorney for the southern district of New York, and the nominee to serve as Director of National Intelligence. Last week, he appeared before the Senate Select Committee to judge his suitability for the role, during which Senator Jon Ossoff repeatedly asked him who won the 2020 presidential election. Clayton declined to answer.
With this simple question, Ossoff has just provided a powerful counter to one that so many progressives have tripped over in the last decade, "what is a woman?" The first example of its deployment that occurred to me was this clip, in which Jo Swinson (then-party leader of the Liberal Democrats) took questions on a call-in radio show. Clearly taken aback, she stumbled through a vague, digressive answer about how "we know what we are" and that all women are important regardless of ethnicity, sexuality or social class. It was like something out of The Thick of It.
Other prominent examples of the question's use include the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (to which she memorably replied "I'm not a biologist") and Sen. Josh Hawley grilling a physician on whether or not men can get pregnant.
But while conservatives and gender-criticals understand how effective "what is a woman?" is in making their ideological opponents look absurd, I think many fail to grasp its precise mechanism of action. You'll often hear such people crowing "How can you claim to know how to run a country, when you don't even know what a woman is?" But of course Swinson knows what a woman is. While she might pretend to endorse a trans-inclusive definition, her revealed preferences surely tell a very different story. I fancy that if she was using a public bathroom and a specimen like "Karen" White strolled in, she'd be out of there like a shot.
Within the progressive coalition, there are a small number of people who subscribe to the woo-y circularity of "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", a "definition"1 that sounds preposterous to anyone with an ounce of common sense. There is a much larger group of people who don't endorse this definition, but are afraid to say so publicly for fear of alienating the crazy people who do. This makes "what is a woman?" a powerful "gotcha" question, as there's no answer a progressive politician2 can give which doesn't serve the inquirer:
The fact that Swinson took the third option strongly suggests that she doesn't endorse gender ideology, but feared alienating the people in her camp who do. She may be a dishonest coward, but she isn't a lunatic: she does, in fact, know what a woman is.
Likewise with Jay Clayton in the clip above. From watching the clip, I imagine many progressives (and perhaps also many conservatives) will conclude that Clayton thinks Trump won in 2020, but refuses to say so outright, knowing that it's an opinion most people rightfully consider absurd. But I would put money on Clayton knowing full well that Biden won, but being too afraid to say so publicly for fear of angering the lunatics in his camp. (And by "the lunatics", I of course mean "the current occupant of the Oval Office and his army of true believers"). Ossoff appears to agree, asking Clayton if it's "humiliating" that Clayton is expected to "indulge the President's delusions". Clayton isn't crazy or stupid: he's just a coward who lacks integrity.
To sum up: "what is a woman?" and "who won the 2020 election?" can expose someone as a lunatic with crazy beliefs. But even if they don't, they can still expose them as a coward or a traitor to their cause, and in some cases that can be just as useful.
II
When I started writing this, it occurred to me that the structure of these "gotcha" questions (wherein the respondent stands to lose face no matter how they answer the question) bears a familial resemblance to a series of anti-woke psyops from a few years back. Beginning in 2017, a group of anonymous pranksters mounted posters around American college campuses bearing the legend "it's okay to be white". If you're a person who agrees that it's okay to be white (not "being white is better than being non-white"; merely that being white is "okay"), you'll respond to these posters with "well, duh". The ingenuity of the psyop was that it forced the people who disagree with the sentiment to lay their cards on the table. The only people who could find something objectionable in the statement "it's okay to be white" are those who actually think white people ought to feel ashamed of themselves for the colour of the skin - something the most extreme woke people obviously believe, even if many of them pretend otherwise. By responding to this utterly milquetoast statement with shock and outrage, these people out themselves, exposing the gulf between their stated and revealed preferences.
Watching these people dutifully step onto the rake laid in front of them was hilarious, but became a bit disturbing when you mentally substitute the specific sentiment they condemned so loudly. "It's sickening and disgusting to know that people think [it's okay to be white]." Superintendent Andy Bennett stated "It is inexplicable and unacceptable [to believe that it's okay to be white]". "[Believing that it's okay to be white is] completely wrong."
A later example followed a similar format. In Winchester, Massachusetts, pranksters hung up posters which simply read "Islam is RIGHT about women". A local woman tore several posters down and reported them to the police, but when pressed, she found it remarkably difficult to articulate what, exactly, she found offensive about them. (It certainly wasn't anything as simple as her disagreeing with the sentiment on its face.)
Here, the purpose of the posters was to expose cognitive dissonance. Someone who endorses Islamic attitudes to women would read the poster and think "well, duh"; likewise someone who swallowed the silly lie-to-children that Islam is a progressive, feminist religion (a sanitised, sanewashed version of the faith that bears essentially no relationship to the genuine article). The only type of person who could be outraged by the sentiment "Islam is right about women" is someone who privately believes that Islamic attitudes towards women are abominable, but who feels uncomfortable saying so out loud for fear of appearing racist. The slogan explodes this obvious contradiction, an experience many Winchester residents found (to quote them directly) "confusing" and "upsetting". It's rather telling that none of the people interviewed said anything like "the posters are correct, because Islam is a progressive feminist faith" or "the posters are wrong, because Islam is a misogynistic religion".
One last example. TERF activist Posie Parker paid for billboards bearing the slogan "woman: adult human female". The gender ideologues just couldn't help themselves, promptly calling for the billboards to be taken down and declaring the definition transphobic. Over at Wikipedia, the phrase is bizarrely included in the category "pejorative terms for women", alongside old stalwarts like "bitch", "slut" and "whore".
III
From the analysis above, "gotcha" questions and psyops serve three essential functions:
Hmm - a political coalition whose constituent factions have massive, irreconcilable points of disagreement which go studiously unremarked upon. A political movement whose members' stated opinions routinely appear vastly out of step with their revealed preferences. A political movement beset by cognitive dissonance at every conceivable resolution.
No doubt there are numerous movements meeting the descriptions above, but for me the first that comes to mind is the pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist movement.
As noted by Yassine Meskhout, if you attend a pro-Palestine march you're almost equally likely to encounter a well-meaning young person who's simply upset by gory war footage in her Instagram feed, and a nutcase who thinks that Hamas are nobly trying to finish the job dear old Adolf started. This fundamental difference of worldview is an absolute godsend for maintaining the movement's superficially positive optics, and is virtually never remarked upon by anyone within the movement:
Earlier this week, Shany Mor posted an excellent article in which he observed that, while most pro-Palestinian types claim to be disinterested humanitarians who object to Israel's war in Gaza solely on account of the needless suffering it imposes upon Gaza's civilian population - in many cases their revealed preferences indicate that they are closeted Hamas supporters who wish to see Hamas accomplish its stated aims, even if that entails more death and suffering among Gaza's civilian populace than would happen otherwise. And while I would like to think the accusation of cognitive dissonance is so obvious that it requires no elucidation, for completeness's sake I will note the peculiar irony that many pro-Palestinians accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing while chanting a slogan whose original untranslated wording3 is a transparent call for ethnic cleansing. They accuse Israel of genocide with every waking breath, while relentlessly signal-boosting propaganda published by an organisation whose founding charter is openly, unabashedly genocidal. It's a movement that purports to be anti-racist, but which is perfectly happy to recycle all of the old blood libels and canards against Jews (Jews secretly control the world, Jews murder Gentile children for their own amusement, Jews are sexually deviant etc.) provided they clarify that they are only addressing them towards "Zionists" * wink wink *.
I think the pro-Palestine movement is long overdue for its very own "what is a woman?" or "it's okay to be white", a psyop or "gotcha" question calculated to expose the irreconcilable tensions in the multiple factions gunning for a "free Palestine", and the gulf between what its members purport to believe and what they actually believe.
I'm not entirely sure what this would look like in practice. At last year's Berlin Film Festival, director Jun Li read out a speech on behalf of the actor Erfan Shekarriz, who boycotted the festival in protest of its purported lack of support to Palestinians. Li was heckled by audience members, one of whom yelled "Free Palestine from Hamas." That's a good start. I've noticed that when I discuss the conflict with my peers (most of whom are very hostile to Israel), many of them get quite taken aback when I point out that the most recent war in Gaza began when Hamas invaded Israel - the relentless focus on the perceived brutality of Israel's military response has caused many to overlook the basic fact that it isn't a war Israel started. Many also give vague evasive non-answers when asked "if you object to how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza, then how do you think they should have responded to October 7th?" Some pro-Palestine types explicitly object to admitting Gazan refugees into Europe (or even neighbouring countries) on the grounds that doing so would constitute "ethnic cleansing"; applying this logic to other world conflicts could be fertile ground for exposing the cognitive dissonance (e.g. "why should we play into Putin's hands by allowing him to ethnically cleanse the Ukraine?").
These are only off the top of my head, I'm just spitballing here. I'm sure someone more creative than I could think of something to rival "Islam is RIGHT about women" in wicked ingenuity.
1 I don't even think it rises to the level of a "definition", frankly. Circular definitions are no such thing.
2 The question is most effective when posed to politicians in democratic societies, as it's the nature of the job that such people have to appeal to a broad swathe of voters with heterogenous beliefs and opinions. It is not half as effective when posed to, say, activists working in the NGO space, wherein the incentives (per the iron law of institutions) favour ostentatious displays of ideological purity, even if you make yourself look ridiculous and insane to ordinary people in the process. Such people don't care what the "median voter" thinks, and will happily respond "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" with a shit-eating grin.
3 من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية, "From the water to the water / Palestine is Arab". I suspect it's not an accident that the English translation sounds so much more palatable to Western ideas of liberty and democracy.
On the balance this is a good post, but I am rather disappointed that you failed to represent the "pro-Palestinian" position charitably in the end. For example, is the categorisation you offer in
really the best you can imagine? Do you not find it conceivable that someone could have gotten an accurate picture of the toll of the war in Gaza from a multitude of reasonably objective sources, and then from that drawn the conclusion (perhaps informed by other values they hold, however much you may disagree with those) that they ought to oppose the Israeli position with all that entails? I don't know what percentage of protesters nowadays get all their news from Instagram, but this is as immaterial as the question what percentage of Israel supporters get all their news from grandmas reposting AI slop on Facebook groups. In either case, their conclusions would most likely not change if you were to put them on a forced diet of Pulitzer-class fact-checked highbrow journalism instead.
I imagine some protesters, with perfect information about what transpired until now, would be happy with an outcome that involves every non-Muslim being expelled from the Levant. Others might not be happy with this, but have the delusion, as progressives are wont to do, that with sufficient reparations and contrition the Muslims will actually flip to running a pluralistic rainbow-coloured paradise in no time (delusional, perhaps, but not definitionally misinformed; information usually is not taken to include inductive reasoning). Yet others may just believe that the Israelis, using their considerable advantage in brains and brawns and wealth, can surely grit their teeth and figure out a way to make everyone there coexist more equitably, if the US just forces them at gunpoint to abandon their preferred strategy of whatever they are doing now (this, to me, seems plausible). Neither of these exactly implies support for "finishing the job dear old Adolf started", and each of them is a considerably more interesting category to engage with than the putative feel-good Instagram pollyannas you choose as the other representative.
To begin with, I don't know if you really want to be playing the "look at the sort of dumb people that exist on the other side" game, considering how much your side depends on the support of people who principally want Israel to exist so it can troll everyone and trigger a sequence of predetermined events that involves Jesus beaming them up into heaven before the UN institutes a one-world government under a Romanian dictator.
I am confident that people meeting this description exist, somewhere in the world. But I'm being completely honest when I say that I've interacted with dozens of people who could be characterised as "pro-Palestinian" or "anti-Zionist" over the past three years, and not one of them expressed any opinions even remotely similar to these. Moderate pro-Palestinians of this sort, so far as I'm aware, simply do not exist in Ireland. Unhinged conspiracism ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!") and barely concealed seething hatred of
JewsZionists is the norm, not the exception. My modal interaction with a pro-Palestinian type does not look like a sober-minded, dispassionate analysis of how to bring about a lasting peace in the region and what a two-state solution might look like in practice: it looks like them accusing me of being a paid Mossad bot who positively delights in the murder of innocent Gazan children for no better reason than sheer bloody-mindedness. Even my own mother (who I ordinarily consider fairly level-headed and even-handed when it comes to politics, Covid excepted) has, in my opinion, become radicalised by a deranged moral panic.It's one thing to request that I represent the pro-Palestinian movement fairly and charitably. It's quite another to demand that I represent it in a manner that bears no earthly resemblance to my (for lack of a better term) "lived experience".
For context: I've mentioned on several occasions that the Crown Prosecution Service was considering charging the hip-hop band Kneecap over their yelling out "Up Hamas" and "Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!" during live performances. They eventually declined to press charges, which I believe was the right decision. But of all the people I've spoken to about this case, exactly one agrees with me that, while yelling "Up Hamas" shouldn't be a criminal offense, it's a shitty thing to do.
So yeah. "Hamas are finishing the heroic job dear old Adolf started" may not be an accurate representation of your experience of the pro-Palestinian movement, but it is an accurate representation of mine, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
I don't think seething hatred of Israel and its supporters as you describe it is particularly incompatible with neither being pro-uncle-Adolf nor being low-information. "Expel all non-Muslims", the one position I suggested you didn't quote, is surely a pretty uncompromising position (and not exactly peaceful or sober-minded, if you try to imagine how this would have to play out in practice). The problem I had with your Instagram dig is that it suggests Instagram was instrumental (and hence that the position would fall apart with a "better" source), but I don't believe that and your description of your "lived experience" is not really giving evidence of it either.
(Perhaps you are making the mistake of thinking the conspiracism is upstream of the hatred, rather than downstream. For most people, once they find someone repellent, attributing additional evils large and small to them is just the natural course of pro-social action.)
I'm sorry, I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.
I'm confused as to what you are confused about.
Correct me if you disagree with anything in this summary: You gave two caricatures of pro-Palestinians, which seem to broadly be glossable as "naive person whose views are attributable to tragic pictures on Instagram" and "actually wants all Jews to die". I disputed that this is a charitable or reasonable taxonomy. You counter-objected that the people you encountered in real life are asserting unhinged/implausible things ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!" - is that actually so unhinged? I thought it was common sense that Eurovision results are always 100% inside baseball astroturf theatre) and that they are cheering on Hamas. I didn't address the latter (though I think it's at most consistent with "expel them from the Levant" which falls well short of "kill them all" - no evidence that they wish death, even indirectly, upon any Jew outside of the Levant), but asserted that the former is not evidence of being fairly described by either of your two caricatures.
Well to start with, I disagree that my "caricatures" are any such thing. I personally know a great many young women who really have learned everything they know about the conflict from extremely selectively composed Instagram infographics, including many now known to contain false information. This was obviously true during the BLM craze of 2020, so I don't know why you're acting so shocked that it's true now.
Likewise, when a person who explicitly supports Hamas, thinks the October 7th attack was a good thing, explicitly states that they no longer feel any sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust etc. – I think it's reasonable to conclude that such a person fundamentally supports Hamas's stated mission of exterminating all Jews, even if they wouldn't say so in so many words, even if they would get very defensive if you suggested they have a terminal goal in common with Hitler. The point of the OP was that I would like to devise a gotcha question that would force these people to be more forthcoming about their opinions than they are currently being. When you say "be more charitable – many of them just want to ethnically cleanse Israel of the yahud!" – well, my response is that these people would never openly cop to supporting ethnic cleansing, even though that's obviously the logical endpoint of their worldview.
(And, seriously – you're getting so defensive about how I characterised the pro-Palestinian movement. "How dare you say we want to kill all Jews – we just want to forcibly ethnically cleanse them from the nation-state they've lived in for the better part of a century!" Is that seriously the moderate option? Is this what a "reasonable" pro-Palestinian person looks like?)
Even if that's the case, that's a completely different claim to the claim that Mossad and Shin Bet rigged the votes without the EBU's knowledge. And if they were capable of doing this, I cannot fathom why they'd rig the vote so that they'd come second, making the conspiracy theory doubly inane.
...and I don't think I was disputing that. I just think it's uncharitable in the simple sense that it is luring the reader into dismissing the position as flimsy or based on incorrect information, when it is neither (not flimsy in the sense that it would be easy to flip, nor based on incorrect information in the but-for causal sense of based on), using the hypothetical example of making a similar sort of assertion about the pro-Israel side. The majority of them can probably be accounted for by one of "Jewish with unapologetic ingroup preference", "actually hates brown people" and "have learned everything they know about the conflict from crazy posts on FB/Twitter", and I think for my lived-experience intersection of "American" and "pro-Israel" this is actually basically exhaustive (I can't comment on the Irish, because the last time I knowingly talked to an Irishman in the flesh was over a decade ago during undergrad); but I don't think that taxonomy would be appropriate either, because the crazy post people implicitly anchor their worldview in community leaders who do have a more interesting position and likewise would not be swayed from their position if you forced them to read some proper objective reporting.
I disagree about Hamas/Oct 7th. The "no longer feel any sympathy" thing is a bit more complicated, though I have to say I have not heard that in the wild from leftists (even those who fall into the former two categories) at all. If you do see it that way, are you willing to bite the bullet and say that the Russian depiction of Ukraine and supportive Westerners as russophobic and genocidal is likewise accurate, given the abundance of similar rhetoric about every Ukrainian hit on Russia? (If yes, well, props for consistency, although I still disagree; if no, I will argue that you seem to be treating Jews as a special category where ill-wishes upon some members and emotive expressions of hostility are treated as uniquely more serious than for any other)
I don't recall ever claiming that it is "moderate" or "reasonable"; I was defending it only against your implicit charges of being non-serious (or, to be precise, either non-serious or significantly more immoderate/unreasonable than this still), as I explained above. I believe that on this forum, at least, we ought to be more careful about pegging movements precisely, rather than doing the normie thing and throwing everything outside a fixed window in the "literally Hitler" (literally so, in this case!) pit.
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