Veto Power

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, police censorship of motion pictures was a significant and always controversial index of the expansion of law enforcement agencies to include activities that many Americans deemed unbecoming of cops. As such, it offers considerable insight into contemporary debates over the scope of police power in the United States. Today’s arguments have deep roots, including in a practice that was far more prevalent—and far more contentious—than conventional histories allow. When it came to vetting motion pictures, the methods of municipal police departments varied widely. But they often illuminated broader problems: Detroit police officers who voted to ban anti-Nazi films were themselves outspoken white supremacists; Chicago cops who balked at cinema’s suggestions of eroticism were also, outside of departmental screening rooms, aggressively targeting sex workers; and Southern lawmen who sought to eliminate intimations of racial equality were known for their brutal treatment of Black residents. Police censorship of motion pictures took place not in a vacuum but within the ever-widening ambit of law enforcement, and it merits scrutiny as a measure of the authority, influence, and cultural identities of municipal cops.

WHITE SUPREMACISTS DECEPTIVELY USING SCREENSHOTS AS EVIDENCE: A SOCIAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO ANALYSING CONSPIRATORIAL YOUTUBE VIDEOS

YouTube has become notoriously associated with extreme right-wing communities that spread discourses of white supremacy and conspiracy. This study applies a social semiotic approach to analysing conspiratorial YouTube videos created by white supremacists in response to the Notre Dame Fire of 2019. In particular, this study applies a combined legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2007) and communing affiliation (Zappavigna and Martin, 2018) framework to the verbal and visual content of 15 videos. Communing affiliation refers to how values are positioned as bondable in situation where users don’t interact directly (Zappavigna and Martin, 2018). It is formed from couplings of ideational (what is being evaluated) and attitudinal (how it is evaluated) meaning (Martin and White, 2005), hence forming a value that is bondable. Legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2007) refers to how discourses establish authority and can be realised textually or visually, with various linguistic strategies. This study will focus on the idea of ‘technological authority’ construed by positive evaluations in the transcripts of screenshots as evidence and the use of screenshots as visual evidence. Overall, this study will show how key values are working in tandem with (de)legitimation strategies, how (de)legitimation can further explain the significance of these values, and how YouTubers artificially create credibility in their videos through these legitimation and affiliation strategies. This raises further questions about the invoked meanings of screenshots as evidence and the ethical dilemmas that screenshots become entangled in, when considering the attention given to false and hateful content that is shared online.

“MISS RONA IS REALLY CLAPPING THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS”: BLACK TWITTER'S POLITICAL HUMOR IN COVID-19 TIMES

As has been widely reported, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately sickened and killed Black Americans. At the same time, however, there is a significant body of conversation on Black Twitter that jokes about the pandemic. This includes tweets that nickname the pandemic as "Miss Rona,” as in “god i need a drink so bad, miss rona i promise i will be good.” Through an analysis of tweets using the “Miss Rona” nickname, we examine how Black Twitter humor serves as a site of political critique of both public policy failures and the Trump administration more broadly, with users leveraging practices like Signifyin’, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and wordplay to resist legibility by outsiders as they orient toward their own community. Black humor is political commentary that resonates with the Black community because the tweets address or refer to Black trauma during the pandemic: dealing with continued racial violence, white supremacist ideology, and medical disparities based on race. The tweets are also expressions of Black Twitter catharsis (joy despite pain) through witty one-sided Twitter banters that skillfully and playfully engage with several facets of the social and political climate. We consider how these conversations go beyond laughing to keep from crying to coded political statements and cultural alliance, and argue that Black Twitter’s jokes about the collective trauma of COVID-19 is a resource for online camaraderie, cultural critique, and community affiliation.

How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education

This paper traces the origins of today’s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the “school choice” enterprise for libertarians was not then—and is not now--to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources. Based on extensive original archival research, this paper shows how Friedman’s case for vouchers to promote “educational freedom” buttressed the case of Southern advocates of the policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. His approach—supported by many other Mont Pelerin Society members and leading libertarians of the day --taught white supremacists a more sophisticated, and for more than a decade, court-proof way to preserve Jim Crow. All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.

“WAKE-UP CALL FOR THE WHITE RACE”: HOW STORMFRONT FRAMED THE ELECTIONS OF OBAMA AND TRUMP

We investigate how users on a prominent forum for white supremacists interpreted and framed two seminal events for the far-right in the U.S., the elections of Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016. These cases precipitated dramatic shifts in the far-right alliance and conflict structure. We combine computational methods and qualitative analysis on a corpus of over ten million posts on Stormfront.org to show how movement actors framed institutional changes and constructed them as opportunities for action. We highlight grassroots framing, the collective and contested bottom-up processes through which external events are framed and reframed by online activists and thus shaped into opportunities for action. Our research demonstrates how users shifted from framing Obama’s election as a threat, to framing it as a “victory in disguise,” creating new opportunities for political action through extraparliamentary methods. Similarly, users framed Trump's election as creating possibilities for radical change through the established political system.

The “Great Replacement” conspiracy: How the perceived ousting of Whites can evoke violent extremism and Islamophobia

Increased immigration and demographic changes have not only resulted in political pushback, but also in violent attacks against immigrants. Several recent terrorist attacks committed by White supremacists invoke rhetoric around a deliberate attempt to make Whites extinct and replace them with non-Western immigrants. Yet, while it is widely acknowledged among extremism researchers that this perception of orchestrated extinction or replacement has tremendous potential to lead to violent extremism, its consequences have not yet been directly examined. Using the Scandinavian context (e.g., Denmark and Norway), in two correlational studies and one experiment, we provide evidence that this perception is associated with the persecution of Muslims, violent intentions, and Islamophobia. Further, we demonstrate that these associations are mediated by symbolic threats. Conspiracy beliefs that one’s group is being replaced seem to drive hostile intergroup attitudes. We discuss the societal implications of this finding (i.e., generating fear, polarization, and hostile public opinion towards immigrants).

Electronic petitioning as online collective action: Examining the e-petitioning behavior of an extremist group in we the people

This study aims to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of the mobilization of online “communities” engaging in collective action to express policy preferences on We the People (WtP), the first web-enabled US government petitioning system initiated by Obama. This Internet-based tool allowed users to petition the Obama Administration and solicit support for policy suggestions. Using petition data from WtP, this case study examines a set of 125 petitions that were created by individuals that are associated with a white supremacist group called The White Genocide Project (The White Genocide Project has recently changed their name to Fight White Genocide). Using data mining techniques, namely market basket analysis and social network analysis, I found evidence of the mobilization of “communities” of an extremist group of white supremacists who systematically and strategically used the WtP platform to broadcast their message by creating and co-signing petitions every month for almost four years.

The Great Replacement Conspiracy: How the Perceived Ousting of Whites Can Evoke Violent Extremism and Islamophobia

Increased immigration and demographic changes have not only resulted in political pushback, but also in violent attacks against immigrants. Several recent terrorist attacks committed by White supremacists invoke rhetoric around a deliberate attempt to make Whites extinct and replace them with non-Western immigrants. Yet, while it is widely acknowledged among extremism researchers that this perception of orchestrated extinction or replacement has tremendous potential to lead to violent extremism, its consequences have not yet been directly examined. Using the Scandinavian context (e.g., Denmark and Norway), in two correlational studies and one experiment, we provide evidence that this perception is associated with the persecution of Muslims, violent intentions, and Islamophobia. Further, we demonstrate that these associations are mediated by symbolic threats. Conspiracy beliefs that one’s group is being replaced seems to drive hostile intergroup attitudes. We discuss the societal implications of this finding (i.e., generating fear, polarization and hostile public opinion towards immigrants).

Reckoning with COVID, Racial Violence, and the Perilous Pursuit of Transparency

This essay reflects on the many upheavals of the past year and their implications for critical scholarship on surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic, anti-science policies, radicalized white supremacists, police killings of people of color, and the resurgence of the racial justice movement all inflect surveillance practices in the contemporary moment. In particular, today’s polarized political landscape makes it difficult to condemn surveillance in the service of the public good, but irrespective of one’s goals or intentions, the embrace of transparency carries its own risks. Transparency, and scientific vision more broadly, is an extension of the Enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution, which from the start sought to advance knowledge and consolidate white power through the violent subjugation of nature, women, and racial minorities. One fundamental risk of valorizing transparency is that doing so occludes the ways that relations of domination are indelibly encoded into surveillance systems and practices. Given this, I argue that the project of decolonizing surveillance inquiry should now be our primary focus as a field.