Get a grip, people. Your conspiracy-minded impulses are making you look stupid
- Rather than discredit President Donald Trump's immigration policies on their merits, people resorted to wild conspiracy theories this week.
- People love conspiracy nonsense that confirms their worst priors about their political opponents.
- That sends a message to people in the political middle: They see this nonsense and wonder if it's the best argument you can come up with, and whether that maybe means your position is indefensible.
You'd think it would be easy enough to make arguments against the Trump administration's immigration policies on their own merits, rather than resorting to numerology and asserting that Department of Homeland Security press releases contain secret neo-Nazi flags borne out in their paragraph structure and formatting choices.
But here we are.
A theory from Oakland software executive Laurie Voss made the rounds on Twitter Thursday, arguing a February DHS release about border issues contained Nazi dog whistles - because its headline began with "We must secure" and ran 14 words, similar to the "14 words" that are a popular slogan among neo-Nazis.
There was more evidence: The release had 14 points, perhaps another reference to the 14 words. And it oddly quoted a statistic "out of 88" instead of the usual 100. "88," corresponding to "HH" or "Heil Hitler," can be another neo-Nazi tag.
Too much to be a coincidence, right? It was enough to get the theory the "people are saying" treatment from BuzzFeed, which later switched to a headline emphasizing the Homeland Security department's denial that it was using a press release to send hidden Nazi messages.
I'm not always inclined to take DHS spokespeople at their word. They do lie. But there are significant problems with Voss' theory that lead me to believe pretty strongly they're telling the truth here.
An inexplicable coincidence that is actually quite explicable
First of all, this supposed "14-point" release only has 13 bullet points.
Some readers determined to land on a count of 14 have pointed to a non-bulleted paragraph, which they add to the 13 bullets. But the release has two non-bulleted paragraphs. So either it has 13 points or 15, not 14.
And as for that statistic quoted out of 88? "On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum"?
The likely reason that's quoted out of 88 is another statistic from DHS: 88% of asylum applicants pass their credible fear screenings. Reuters reported that statistic a year before this press release was issued.
So here we have a press release with 13 bullets, which quotes a statistic out of 88 for a reason we can identify. None of that seems especially neo-Nazi. All that leaves us with is the headline.
And yeah, I'd rewrite that headline. But is it so implausible that the headline's unfortunate structure is a coincidence?
"We must secure the border and build a wall" is a concise summary of points President Donald Trump makes about immigration frequently. If you use this long headline format, sometimes your headline will be 14 words.
And if this press release is really a frog-Nazi alt-right mole s--tpost from four months ago with an inside-joke headline, where's the 4Chan thread celebrating it? Internet Nazis are not exactly a quiet bunch. Is it supposed to have been a private joke just for its author?
But beyond all that, I'd suggest stepping back.
Were you exercised about the statistic out of 88, or about the 14 points that turned out to actually be 13 points? Did you see something you now realize isn't really there? Shouldn't that make you pause and wonder if you were seeing other things that also weren't there?
Were you, maybe, just a little addled by the news?
This is how people fall for QAnon
People love conspiracy nonsense that confirms their worst priors about their political opponents.
It's not enough to say Trump administration officials are doing something morally wrong, or acting without a moral compass, or driven by racist motivations, or inflicting a cruel policy for sport. No - they must be literal Nazis, and we must be able to divine that fact through a close reading of their press releases for hidden messages.
Of course, the right does much, much more of this than the left, which is how so many Trump fans came to believe John Podesta was involved in a pedophile ring run out of a pizzeria and that the DNC murdered Seth Rich. (Note: neither of those is true.)
Even a few conservative pundits who are too smart for Pizzagate fell for a less pernicious-yet-still obvious hoax on Thursday: a fake CNN Politics tweet asserting Maxine Waters said the next Supreme Court justice should be an illegal immigrant.
Guys. Maxine Waters didn't say that. And if she had, she would have said "undocumented immigrant."
Conspiracy politics is fun but stupid and self-defeating
Turning the freakout up to 11 and believing every negative claim about your political opponents can feel good. It allows you to have pornographic feelings of righteous outrage, and it allows you to show what a strong believer you are - you're not the sort of naive, milquetoast fool who would be skeptical of the claim that a press release's bullet structure is a hidden Nazi message.
But there are two main problems with this. One is that it makes you look like an idiot. The other is the message it sends to people in the political middle: They see this nonsense and wonder if it's the best argument you can come up with, and whether that maybe means your position is indefensible.
Think about it: If this is an argument you're focusing time and energy on, isn't that liable to make you sound kind of crazy, and maybe like you don't have a better argument to advance?
There has been a tendency to throw one's hands up in the Trump era and say facts don't matter. There is a temptation to mimic his supporters' worst instincts and let go of your own grip on reality.
But Italian-American economist Luigi Zingales has good advice about Italy's experience with Silvio Berlusconi: The way you beat an incompetent demagogue is through normal politics, explaining how bad he is at everything, not by trying to match his hysterics, which will only earn him sympathy.
There is plenty to hate about Trump's policies at the border. There's no need to read Nazi codes into the publicity materials.