Reflection on ICE and The Media

As always, I have thoughts on media polarization and what needs building

I often hear people say that “everyone ought” to “speak up” and “take a stand” during certain kinds of political crises. I do not subscribe to this philosophy. I think it is generally fine for people to not say anything if they don’t have anything to add to the conversation; I also have observed that, with many people who comment habitually on issues du jour, their words seem disconnected to deeper integrity; and furthermore, the people loudest with these moral incitements usually have little to lose. With that said, I’ve been discussing ICE’s current actions with friends and family, and I thought it might be useful for me to finally write down some thoughts about it.

There are certain problems in our current quagmire that I have thought about a lot. Last year I wrote a post called “Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020,” which told the story of how I ended up getting involved in Red Tribe. (Note that I generally use the phrases “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe,” which are common in my Bay Area social context, as opposed to words like “conservative”-“right” or “liberal”-“left.” I use those phrases because they signify the cultural boundaries differentiating these groups.)

A big reason I got involved in the dissident right was that I was accidentally present in Minneapolis-St. Paul during the riots of 2020. Those riots (a) definitely happened, and (b) were so under-reported by the mainstream media that my Blue Tribe friends will sometimes, to this day, read that post and message me in shock about how little they knew about the 2020 riots.

In 2020, I had recently started a small magazine, and I had done lots of other media work, including work on political polarization and how it intertwines with social media. So it was natural for me to focus on how the media presented things. Like most people working in the media industry, I was very Blue Tribe. But I got deeply involved in Red Tribe because of what I observed during that time, both in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and in the media.

In the USA in the 2020s, people who work on social change are often expected to have a “theory of change.” A “theory of change” is an explanation for why a given activity will lead to a given desirable social change.

The basic theory of change, and process, that I pursued around 2020 and the surrounding years could be described as follows:

1. I took as a given that depolarization would involve people in both political tribes learning to understand each other’s worldviews and communicate better. I also took it as a given that depolarization would be a good thing, as I believed it would reduce the chances of the USA ending up in a civil war. (For me personally, there was also a spiritual aspect; polarity is interesting as a spiritual and energetic question, and at the time I had unresolved questions about it.)

2. Given that I was starting from a deeply ingrained Blue Tribe perspective, I did several projects to educate myself about Red Tribe understandings of the world. During that time, I found that I personally shared some Red Tribe stances, while some of my other stances remained with Blue Tribe. I learned a lot about different perceived realities between Red vs. Blue Tribe.

3. I began to seriously consider the question of what it would take for a media organization to serve both Red Tribe and Blue Tribe. I tentatively concluded that such an org would require a very different mentality, and possibly also a different set of internal processes, compared to any other existing media org. I began to iterate on processes that might become the basis for such an organization. I talk about this a little bit in my “Why I Was Part Of The Dissident Right” post; one of those iterations was named The Territory.

4. With The Territory, I hoped to develop a community of people who cared more about observing reality than taking political sides, and could develop a shared epistemic basis across political tribal lines. The core idea here is that, to develop a media organization that can serve both Red and Blue tribes (and maybe other tribes as well!), the organization will first need to know the truth of what is happening on the ground, and to be able to tell the story from the perspective of both tribes.

5. When I met my ex-fiancé, a famous Red Tribe writer, I was in the midst of meeting Red Tribe groups and integrating these ideas. Obviously, our engagement supercharged this process and showed me new angles that I would have had a hard time finding on my own. Unfortunately for me, the engagement ended in an international scandal and left me a single mom with a case of PTSD. As a result, it has been kind of hard for me to do sustained full-time work over the last couple of years. I have focused on recovery and on projects compatible with recovering while caring for a small child.

I am doing a lot better now, and I want to get back to work. But where to go from here?

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It’s common among writers I track to point out the difference in the media perspectives — the split reality — between today’s political tribes. (If you haven’t read anything like that, here is a post from this morning, written by Substacker Jeff Giesea, that basically summarizes the perspective. His post ends with a warning to Red Tribe that it’s in the process of drastically overreaching, an assessment I agree with; as a surprise bonus, he cites the religious scholar René Girard.)

So, here is my take. It is absolutely true that there is a “split reality” between Red and Blue Tribe. This is a core part of today’s rapidly escalating hostilities, and the problem will not be solved by more people making angry, moralizing statements on social media. With that said, I do feel that what ICE is doing right now in Minneapolis-St. Paul is insane and obscene, and it’s even worse that their leadership recruited and sent them into their current situation in the way that it did.

The context matters. The current ICE problem is different from what I saw with the riots in 2020, in the sense that it is not at all under-documented; if anything, the difficulty sorting out what’s currently happening on the ground is now a problem of too much information, rather than too little. But it is the same problem, in the sense that the different media narratives between the two tribes are contributing to escalating hostilities. It is the same problem that I was trying to address with the organizational iterations I began in 2020.

Last year, when there was some slight unrest in Los Angeles, a person I knew from the misinformation industry messaged to ask me if I knew what was happening. I said that I hadn’t had time to look into it, and I asked what they were reading. Their response haunts me: They said they hadn’t seen any media coverage they trusted; but, they added, if I’d known anything of significance about what was happening, then “I would have trusted you.” They would have trusted my report if I’d had one, but I didn’t have one.

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Somehow my toddler has learned the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song from the Civil War era. He’s been running around singing it. I don’t know how this happened, because it’s not a song I typically listen to. But recently, to make him happy, I found a Joan Baez cover. So we’ve been listening to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

I started crying, recently, as I listened.

Here’s what I’m working on right now: Last year I started writing more on Substack, including a recent piece about my experiences being “canceled left and right.” I received a grant from Tyler Cowen to partially subsidize my writing here, and I’ve also been grateful to get more paid Substack subscribers (thank you again). I have a big project with a major media company that I’m still finishing up (someday…). I have some stories I want to write, and I’ve been looking at funding possibilities for those stories, like maybe advance crowdfunding specific stories one by one. And I’ve been tentatively playing with vibe coding, which might be able to help with future iterations of The Territory.

Here’s what I think needs building, what I wish I had money to build: It is something like a think tank and something like a foundation, and it is centrally a community-building effort. It publishes media in several different forms, including a magazine, and it develops interactive media tools that can be shared. It gives grants to aligned people or pays them to do internal projects, such as articles, and invites them to contribute within its community. It is an organization with truth at the core. In a situation like today with ICE, or a situation like the 2020 riots, this organization would be able to keep decent people informed in real time about what is happening on the ground, and help them navigate what that means for them.

A person who builds such a thing would not necessarily be super safe from political vicissitudes. (I’ll admit, I think uncomfortably often of the Mexican moms I described in my post “The Media and the Polycrisis.”) But I do think that if someone can pull this off, they’ll do a lot of good.

Maybe I’ll manage to get the money this year. Or maybe someone else will build it? It doesn’t have to be me. If anyone out there is working on anything like this, please get in touch. I am more than happy to share any knowledge I might have with you, for free if needed. I just want the media to be equal to the challenges that are coming for us.

God help us all.

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