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Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
...aaand I hit the character limit. Well, I didn't have much more to add. But as political figures go, Rebekah Jones was not on my list of people I expected to ever hear about again. How is she still out there participating in society? How does she continue to get attention from the news media? As far as I can tell, she's never accomplished anything meaningful, ever. Her fifteen minutes of fame consisted in raising a large sum of money by being a critic of DeSantis who was willing to take dramatic liberties with the truth. And now there are likely thousands, even tens of thousands of Twitter and Reddit users whose priors just got updated in favor of "DeSantis is a facist" based on a kettle of lies and exaggerations amplified by institutions that will turn around tomorrow and warn us about misinformation.
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
I would distill it down to "signal boost anyone who is on your side in the given culture war battle, regardless of truth value."
Or even better, "signal boost literally anyone who is saying things that are helpful to your immediate instrumental goals, regardless of their truth value."
That last one allows you to signal boost even your opponents saying true things when it is politically beneficial to you that said true things be heard, or at least heard from the opponent.
Hence, if Trump is saying bad things about Desantis, this man that the left has uniformly agreed that had to be silenced is, in fact, worthy of signal boosting to the extent it hurts DeSantis/sows dissension amongst the GOP.
That is the simplest algorithm for any political actor to run. "Does this signal seem to help my tribe's goals? If so, scream it loud and wide. If not, ignore or stifle it."
The truth of falsity need not even be a concern!
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I don't think that's is a very charitable way of describing this, but I do think there's a grain of truth to this that could lead to fruitful discussion. When I read this description of what happened, not having heard of this person before and taking the top-level post at its word, the first thing I was reminded of was the affair of Jussie Smollett, whose hate crime hoax was initially met with immense amounts of support and sympathy, leading to a TV interview where he theorized that the supposed hate crime was motivated by his outsized criticism of "45," i.e. Donald Trump, before the absurdities in his story quickly caused the public perception tide to turn against him. I think anyone with a clear head or a belief in ethics would have recognized the hoax was both bad in itself and highly likely to be bad for himself, but I'd wager Smollett had neither. And the adoration that he received in the brief period before his story broke down was very real and very sizable, something I'm guessing he truly got a lot out of.
And this in turn reminded me of the affair of Jackie Coakley, the University of Virginia student whose story of being gang-raped as part of an apparent frat house hazing ritual was the basis for the Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which made waves about 10 years ago before it was retracted by the publication for purportedly lacking in veracity. I don't remember it too well, and Coakley wasn't a public figure like Smollett who actively tried to publicize herself, but I recall what little we got from her was that she genuinely stuck to her guns that the story was real, despite the lack of evidence.
What these highlight to me is that there are some people who are so narcissistic and lacking in a sense of ethics and honesty that they're willing to lie in an effort to gain... something that feeds their egos. I don't know if it's called sociopathy or what, but I feel like it's very similar to the kind of mentality we see in (people I think are) scam artists like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or possibly Sam Bankman-Fried or the guy who ran the Fyre Festival or Travis Pangburn. Who knows why they are the way they are, but they're that way, and they'll likely always be with us.
So as a society, it falls on the rest of us to have norms and rules and laws that allow us to accurately detect and prevent/punish people like that. And I think if you want to be charitable to your "political opposition," their failure is that they've created an environment that provides weak points for people like that to attack.
Another thing associated with your "opposition" I was reminded of when reading this post was "Believe Women" (FYI the fact that Jones in this story is a woman is tangential to the point I'm making, not least because her claim isn't one of sexual abuse). There is some controversy over what this actually means, muddled by the fact that "Believe All Women" was also a common variant of the phrase for a time, but the most charitable version of it that I've encountered is something like, "In the past, accusations by women against abusers were automatically treated with hyperskepticism, leading to many men to get away with abusive behavior, leading to more women being abused. Like it or not, you, by nature of living in this society, are also infected with this tendency towards hyperskepticism. In an effort to correct this injustice, you when judging the veracity of the next woman's claim of being abused, you should err on the side of believing her." This most charitable version still literally means that you personally should override what you personally believe to be your best judgment: your very ability to judge is not to be trusted, in favor of, well, "Believe Women."
The "Believe Women" meme is only one in a long line of similar memes and messages about overriding one's own best judgment in favor of taking claims at their word based on the particular scenario and identity. "Lived experience" is probably the most famous one. And there's a real belief that this is the ethical and just thing to do here, supported by a scaffolding of narratives around oppression and history and what is really believed to be social science. That the current oppressive structure of society has essentially infected the minds of everyday people with invisible - or "implicit" - biases that tilt them against the words of certain types of people, which must be actively fought against by consciously overriding their very ability to judge things.
When you have this sort of norm of shredding one's skepticism in certain circumstances, it becomes very easy to convince oneself that any particular case that makes one's enemies look bad must fit the circumstances. You do that enough times, and it just becomes automatic, to determine one's own skepticism based on how bad it makes one's enemies look, rather than based on the actual specifics of the situation at hand. And this norm has been pushed and pushed and pushed as the only correct thing to do in many influential leftist circles.
And let me be clear, I don't think this is well intentioned; but what I believe it is is an attempt at being well intentioned. This sort of downstream negative impacts aren't immediately obvious at first blush, but neither are they so counterintuitive and complex that it would take a genius to figure out. Every individual who believes in pushing some sort of sociopolitical message has the responsibility to think through things at least enough to figure this out. And the people who pushed this sort of norm hadn't. And so they failed in their attempt to be well intentioned. But they don't outright believe that "signal boosting liars" is their best idea. They just find themselves doing it because the norms they follow have corrupted their ability to distinguish between liars and truthtellers in cases where the lies are very flattering to their side.
I think this is a trap that everyone everywhere can fall into, and due to the asymmetry between the right and the left, the way it instantiates on the right-wing is different, looking more like authoritarian hierarchical organizations, such as the church. Our society has done a bang-up job in explicitly identifying and subverting such organizations for at least the past few decades, and I think (hope) we're catching up to doing the same for the left versions.
An aspect of this I think you left out, is how much honest to god bravery it took to point out that the Emperor had no clothes in these circumstances. These people were peddling ridiculous, obvious fictions. And mainstream institutions were willing to slander all critics for as long as they could until a certain critical mass formed, real acts of journalism occurred, and the trivially low bar of verifying "Does this person in the story even exists?" came out looking very badly for the liars.
Even here, and it's antecedent, I recall users getting modded for nakedly asserting Smollett was an obvious hoax. That's how much control they have over the overton window, that calling a spade a spade, if they make it "inflammatory" enough, becomes difficult to point out even in a place like this. They've already hacked our sensibilities to such a degree that we can barely tell the truth even to ourselves.
At least we still have that. A lot of people I meet don't. They're living off whatever the latest NPC update is uncritically.
Are you talking about on /r/themotte? Because I do not recall that. I recall people expressing skepticism very quickly. I thought the story smelled fishy right from the beginning, and indeed I think there was a general consensus in the early days that it was so obviously fishy that even mainstream journalists were being visibly cautious in their reporting, even before they were willing to openly question the story.
Here. It’s very much about the naked and culture warring, rather than mere skepticism, but given the original claim…
I don't think his response was culture warring, especially compared to the post it was responding to.
I'm with you that this particular response was hard to fault in its context, and the moderator action was bad optics. At the same time, though, while this risks airing something of a personal grudge that I've been trying my best to keep to myself most of the time, I think it was very representative of a general pattern of posts by Nybbler, who in my view has a knack for making perfectly rule-conforming and highly popular posts that seem to be perfectly optimised for driving away (or at least inducing meltdowns in) left-wingers in the audience, thus actively subverting the forum's purpose of bringing together opposing culture war groups in cordial discussion.
If I try to pin it down, it's a combination of dismissiveness of things the other side cares about, absolute confidence, and a laconic minimalism that provides minimal attack surface for objections and puts the burden of counterargument on the other side. Think of something like going into an Atheist-vs.-Christian debate forum and responding to someone making a long post about what it must have been like when Jesus realised his own divine mission with a one-line "Jesus was a cult leader. He knew he had no such thing." Most people here seem to intuitively understand that well enough to steer clear of posting like that themselves, but still can't get themselves to not cheer on it when it is done in favour of their own team; and it's stupidly hard to write a specific rule against it that doesn't wind up amounting to "don't just state facts" ("write like you want everybody to be included in the discussion" is the closest one). Darwin was being obnoxious and wrong, but he was the manageable kind of obnoxious and wrong that seemed to generally invite more and better engagement in the form of attempts to defeat his claims in detail. Nybbler's counterpunch, correct though it may be, had the nature of a school bully knowing precisely when the teacher is looking away so he can give you another subtle shove, so when you snap it looks like you are the unreasonable one.
Funny enough, I have a similar view of Darwin. He (or she) had an annoying habit of ignoring the meat of a response and focusing on one particular aspect (often in a straw man sorta way) to avoid having to concede the issue. Darwin generated responses precisely because Darwin attempted to dance around arguments instead of address them head on.
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Nybbler’s comment was the opposite of content-free, it was an unhedged bet, and he deserves even more credit for it than the other wafflers who doubted the story. By adding confidence to the mere direction of the bet, it provided more of an attack surface.
Partisan hacks only think their attacks are sharp and to the point like nybbler’s. And I don't mean darwin. His laconic game elsewhere wasn’t too shabby either, and the people it annoyed argued much like you do.
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No it doesn't, and I have no idea how you can describe it in this way. He literally stuck his neck out, if he ended up being wrong he'd look like a complete twat. All Darwin had to do to avoid looking like one was say something like "well, I guess we'll find out".
Interesting analogy. I spent my youth at these sorts of forums, and they were brutal to the Christians. Nybbler-type responses would have been seen as quite courteous.
Anyway, if the rule is supposed to be "don't be dismissive of things the other side cares about", I'm game, but that's in direct contradiction to letting progressives make sweeping claims about society, and to call their opponents racist, "fragile", and conspiracy theorists. The demand that everybody else just sits and takes it, and only responds in the nicest possible way, comes off as ridiculously one-sided.
I completely disagree, and in my opinion it's the opposite. If Darwin's comment resulted in better engagement, it's not thanks to the nature of his comment, which was making sweeping and obnoxious claims about his outrgroup, it's because everybody else knew they have to be on their best behavior or get modded. Nybbler's counterpunch was the snapping at the bully.
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Back on reddit. The_Nybbler literally got banned for telling Darwin it's fake, while Darwin got to run around calling people racist for being skeptical.
Yep. IIRC Darwin was scolding us all for not taking that sort of thing seriously (I don't think it had even been discussed at all yet). I looked it up, concluded it was an obvious hoax, and told him to gloat while he could, because that story had more red flags than a May Day parade or something similar, and ate the ban for it.
Do you have any sense of when this might have occurred? The Smollett hoax happened in January 2019, before I was a moderator in the sub. Your first ban from the Motte was in June 2019 on an unrelated comment. Your next ban from the Motte was in May of 2020, then June, July, November, December--still no Smollett comments in the log on those.
I can't speak to your bans from /r/SSC, and it's always possible something got left out of the log! And Darwin2500 has a particularly infuriating gift for baiting people into crossing the line. But if you did eat a ban for a Smollett comment in the Motte, it would be interesting to see the context of that, I think.
EDIT: Thanks to @gattsuru for finding the link--looks like it was indeed /r/SSC, not the Motte--and it looks like a warning rather than a ban, but that is not entirely clear to me.
Nice that you/gattsuru found it, I've been looking for it all over the place. I swear to god the glowies at the NCRI deliberately made all the reddit search tools suck so they can keep the deets on everyone, while denying them to others.
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This is going to sound harsh, but I do think it's accurate, in that I think there always has been a sense that the best argument actually is "We will have the power". You know...that whole "Right Side of History" thing? And sometimes that "will" in the first phrase gets lost, so it's just "We have the power". And with that comes all sorts of Moral License and all that. In reality, we're talking pure Toxoplasma of Rage.
I really am very progressive myself, as well as liberal. Small-p. But I do think the full-throated embrace and exploitation of post-modernism is worrying for a whole host of reasons. Again, I'm not even opposed to post-modernism in a reflective, sober perspective. But what we're seeing here is something more like a search for power. The further you can go, and get away with if not outright cheered and supported the more pressure it puts on people to adopt your views/join your group.
Note, this applies to parts of the right as well, I think.
I agree.
Right. One of the things I'm thinking about in connection with this case is just... weaponized rage, I guess. Jones is, for whatever reason, a bottomless well of rage, and my instinct is to respond by not talking about her, or others like her. To exercise the virtue of silence, to pursue the ideal embodied in the rules about focusing on the best ideas of those with whom I disagree. But it seems like this might also be a kind of trap, where one side's "righteous anger" is always a straight-faced headline while the other side's "unhinged paranoia" gets a laugh track on the Daily Show.
Meanwhile, there is a victim in this: a child, not yet a teenager, who apparently finds life so burdensome as to plot mass murder, or at least to pretend that he is. Kids say stupid stuff, and I'd like us not to ruin their lives over it. But also, it kind of seems like his mother has already ruined him, in great measure, by being an avatar of the culture wars. Can we talk about that tragedy--and I do think it is a tragedy!--without careening off the culture war angles? I honestly just don't know.
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Jesus Christ. It’s depressing to imagine a 13 year old making credible murder threats, but if he does…well, our hands are tied. Have you seen any links to the alleged meme?
Also, I guess this is an object lesson: just because there’s a political motivation to do something doesn’t mean it’s the wrong move. There are rules. Speaking of which,
There are definitely better ones to talk about. This is awfully close to the platonic ideal of “look what those people did.”
I was going to say “most everything in the current CW thread,” but it looks like it’s been derailed by date-me doc bullshit. So maybe Rebekah Jones really was the best the left had to offer.
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Jones posted it. It's a fat police officer with the caption "cops in their car waiting for the school shooter to kill himself so they can go in." But the point is that the meme was not the problem, the threats were the problem.
Fifteen minutes ago Jones tweeted:
So she continues to maintain that this is about a meme in the face of overwhelming evidence against that claim. (The idea that she "bested" DeSantis is also just... wild. He won re-election with almost 60% of the vote.)
Did you notice me lampshade this at the beginning of my post? How about the tightrope metaphor? Was I too subtle? I did try to note that there are similarly bizarre figures on the "other side" (with the caveat that they seem to get less vocal support from rank-and-file conservatives; even Santos and Greene take flak from Fox News, do not enjoy the support of default subreddits, etc.). I do think this is an interesting case study for the idea that white liberals are more likely to have mental problems. I don't think Jones is the "best" of what the left has to offer! What catches my attention, though, is the apparently large numbers of leftists who apparently believe that she is, including, apparently, the Miami Herald. That's interesting to me, in ways that Jones herself really isn't.
Yeah, you were pretty clearly aware. Certified Deiseach moment.
I think that’s still against the spirit of the thread, if not the letter.
It is about the Culture War, in the sense of “here’s some two-movies-one-screen news coming down the pike which will probably ignite flamewars you may get caught up in, here’s a side of the story you may not see represented elsewhere, but feel free to research it yourself.”
I feel both smarter and dumber for having read it.
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Not sure I follow. Pretty sure that neither me nor nara is a Deiseach alt.
It would be pretty funny if naraburns had been running a "feisty Irish lady" alt all this time I guess.
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