Reductio ad stupid: On Trolls, Cancel Culture, and the GOP’s Minority Insurgency
A week ago Sunday, Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, posted the following observation on Twitter:
I responded with what I thought was an innocuous scholarly gloss on the observation:
Note to self: nothing related to trans folks is innocuous on social media. Given that this topic touched one of toxic masculinity’s most sensitive nerves, I really shouldn’t have been surprised by the modest blowback my tweet provoked. It started innocently enough with a request for the source of the quote, albeit punctuated with a gif of a snarky teen, in which the writer pointed to things like “fecal matter” and “vomit,” as well as “violence, cruelty, and hatred,” as sources of disgust. The disgust/desire nexus is at the heart of the latter three where trans folks are concerned, but I was on a work shift at the time, and the gif raised questions about the writer’s openness to a meaningful exchange. So I simply provided in good faith a link to the source in Google Books — Stallybrass and White’s Politics and Poetics of Transgression, ftr — noting that I hadn’t read it, and that I presumed the authors were “referring to people’s disgust for each other in particular contexts.” Well, as the old saying goes, the road to Animal House is paved with good intentions, as things quickly devolved after that. Responses, and responses to responses, included something about “a poop fetish,” a gif of a transfemme person responding to being misgendered (the poster’s reference to the way she “looked” was, I presume, his attempt to dismiss all trans women for not meeting his cisnormative standards of female beauty), and this charming little drawing:
I didn’t engage with any of this subsequent nonsense since the point of trolling isn’t to further dialogue, but to shut it down through the tactic of reductio ad stupid. The poor cousin of the reductio ad absurdam argument, reductio ad stupid is less a rhetorical device than a show of force: an assertion of superiority from privilege and numbers, a reveling in the ability to parade one’s bellicose idiocy secure in the presumption that a herd of likeminded people will happily pigpile onto the exchange. Locker room demagoguery, in sum. The only way to shut down a troll, short of banning them altogether from the platform in question, is to shame them into silence. And after four long years of the Troll King’s occupation of the White House, shame has become an exceedingly high bar to reach.
Raising the specter of the former guy connects this little mardi gras coffee break from sense and civility to larger trends in our nation’s public discourse. While the relative anonymity of social media platforms like Twitter lends itself to a certain amount of bad behavior, Trump’s belligerent, divisive use of the platform during his presidency made trolling the tantrum of choice among many of the louder voices on the right. I would argue that trolling has become something more than a mere excrescence of grievance politics, though, in particular in the wake of Trump’s loss last November and the GOP’s loss of the Senate after the January Georgia runoffs. Like complaints about “cancel culture,” it has taken its place alongside the weaponizing of the Bill of Rights (“religious freedom,” 2A, etc.) and more direct assaults on the democratic process like “election integrity” bills as one of the right’s tools in its increasingly authoritarian efforts to establish minority rule. It might seem like a stretch on first glance to connect transphobic nastiness on Twitter to voter suppression in Georgia and elsewhere. But the fact that GOP-controlled legislatures across the country are currently devoting almost as much time to banning trans youth from sports as they are to resurrecting Jim Crow points to the common link between them: the desire to silence and ultimately erase those who don’t fit their narrow, bigoted definition of the body politic as white, cisgender, straight, Christian — and Republican. In what follows, I’ll consider how trolling and “cancel culture” work in tandem to contribute to this repressive aim.
Given its grade school bully ethos, trolling bears an obvious Lord of the Flies-style relationship to strongman exercises of power. Cancel culture bellyaching, by contrast, seems antithetical to authoritarianism on its face, much in the way a whining teen compares unfavorably with, say, Vladimir Putin on a horse.
In truth, though, cancel culture as an expression of right-wing grievance politics functions like trolling as a discursive cudgel to shut down opposing arguments instead of engaging with them. To complain about being “canceled” is an aggressive way of fingering your opponent as the aggressor, since it asserts that their objection to something you’ve done or said is out of all proportion to the pushback you (may or may not) deserve. Its aggression lay not just in the way it amplifies your opponent’s objection — from censure to cancellation: clutch the pearls — but also in the extremist assertion about free speech that typically underlies it.
Consider Ohio Rep Jim Jordan’s recent defense of Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor after a bipartisan group of Representatives voted to strip her of her committee assignments: “Everyone has said things they wish they didn’t say. Everyone has done things they wish they didn’t do…So who’s next? Who will the cancel culture attack next?” What is perhaps most striking about this extraordinary statement is how blithely it passes over the reasons Greene lost her assignments. Arguably the most serious was the following social media post, which House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer made the focal point of a blistering rebuke of Greene in the lead-up to the vote on the measure:
Sure, Jim, there are arguments I’ve had with friends and family members for which I would love to have a do-over. I’ll be sure to leave my AR-15 at home this time.
Greene isn’t so much a politician as a professional troll, a high-profile mouthpiece for the nastiest and most batshit ideas (if that’s not too strong a word) circulating on the right. Jordan’s blaming her loss of her assignments on cancel culture illustrates how this tactic works in tandem with trolling. Invoking cancel culture provides trolls cover by tacitly pushing a radically amoral interpretation, or distortion, of the First Amendment. That distortion runs as follows: where speech with even the most tenuous claim to being “political” is concerned, Greene, and by implication anyone, should have the freedom to say whatever TF they want to whenever and wherever TF they want to, and not face consequences for doing so, or at least not substantial consequences. They should be able to juxtapose a photo of themselves holding a military-style weapon with pix of three congresswomen of color, refer to themselves as the women’s “worst nightmare,” and then blow off the pushback as “paranoid and ridiculous. Fake news is always looking for the next conspiracy theory. This question is idiotic. Go back to bed.” At most, they can be made to go through the motions of an apology before getting back to business as usual. Jordan’s cancel culture objection, in short, attempts to place the troll’s thinly veiled threats of GBH and incoherent retaliatory bluster on a par with reasoned arguments and sincere mea culpas as equally valid expressions of individual views. To which I respond: that being the case, why not save Greene the trouble of opening her mouth — and the rest of us the headache of listening to her — and let her respond to her accusers by flipping them off? (NB: That was a reductio ad absurdam argument.)
In practice, of course, complaints about cancel culture like Jordan’s are made every bit as much in bad faith as Greene’s transparently insincere posturing as a legislator. The cancel culture dismissal’s amoral distortion of the First Amendment isn’t motivated by a commitment to epistemological pluralism, or if you prefer, anarchy. Rather, it’s a weapon being wielded in a war on the Enlightenment ideal of civil discourse founded on evidence-based truth that underlies our democracy. It’s part of an epistemological blitzkrieg to clear space for an alternative “truth,” one that derives its authority not from any independent standard of factuality, but merely from the word of those in power. Viz. the “Big Lie,” for which there’s no evidence other than Trump’s constant repetition of it and its 24/7 presence in the right-wing echo chamber. As many have noted, the purpose of lies like this one is to precipitate “truth decay,” the erosion of faith in the possibility of any generally agreed-upon view of the world, and thereby create a sort of truth-vacuum that the party with the most AR-15s can fill. This latter point is key: violence is central to the advancement of any minority insurgency because of the insurgency’s lack of broad-based popular support. The measures the insurgents resort to needn’t be overtly violent — they can, for example, take the form of repressive legislation — but the possibility of physical violence must always loom.
In asserting that Greene shouldn’t be “canceled” for signaling that three of her colleagues should be shot, Jordan was attempting to preserve that possibility by invalidating any justification for punishing calls for violence.
I can’t say whether the Twitter users who participated in the transphobic pigpile I described at the start of this piece subscribe to Trumpian GOP politics. Still, their behavior was of a piece with the tactics the GOP is using in their battle to remake the nation in their own image. Trolling and invocations of cancel culture are part of an effort to drown out logical or fact-based arguments with nostalgic fantasy, and to keep a portion of the body politic hungry for the realization of that fantasy, and in a froth of inchoate rage over anyone or anything that seems to impede it. And trans folks are useful targets for that rage (the right doesn’t give a fuck about us as anything else), since we evoke strong feelings about a subject that many resent having to give more thought to than a glimpse between someone’s legs requires — a subject, that is, that anyone can pretend they’re an expert in. Put another way, our existence lends itself to the troll’s reductio ad stupid assaults: “I know all about ‘gender identity’ — I got a dick, don’t I?” Claro, amigo, and I have a brain, but that doesn’t make me a neurosurgeon.
