"It's not us! It can't be us! It's the other side!"
Congress, Radicalization, and Direction-Brained Media Spin
This morning, Congress called on the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit to testify at a hearing about the “radicalization of online users” on October 8th. The Oversight Committee letter spells it out plainly:
“The hearing will examine radicalization of online forum users, including incidents of open incitement to commit violent politically motivated acts.”
That’s it. No mentions of “left-wing” or “right-wing,” it’s not specific or partisan in its wording, just radicalization and politically motivated violence.
That’s not how it’s being covered, though!
The first partisan story I saw about this was from Leading Report. According to them, the hearing is about “Left-wing radicalization.” And so it is for anyone who is right-wing and hears the word “radicalization.”
On the other side, Polygon published a piece that reads like a checklist of far-right extremism: Charlottesville, Buffalo, Highland Park, neo-Nazis, white supremacists. It presents the hearing as if the entire point is to hammer down on right-wing radicalization.
Neither is wrong in saying that extremists use these platforms. But every damn thing that happens gets reframed as ammo for whichever “side” you’re obsessed with. If you’re right-brained, it’s always the left. If you’re left-brained, it’s always the right.
And while people are pointing at each other in their own class, yelling about culture war and ideology rather than about who rules and who doesn’t, the rulers selectively satisfy calls to silence, slowly and deliberately, back and forth. Trump has silenced some leftists, and Biden has silenced some right-wingers.
What really happens is that a precedent is set—not on who, but how—to crack down on ideas and speech.
Thinking of saying something might need to change in society? Well, a lot of powerful people don’t want society to change. They even need it not to change! And the more the ruling class are empowered to do to your ideological opponents, the more they are empowered to do to you.
I’m not even going to pretend I have an answer for you, but it’s not endlessly playing into the conditions that disempower the subordinate class.
Maybe at some point we’ll all finally see this.