Ian Danskin

my name is Ian Danskin I'm a video essayist I run a YouTube channel called innuendo studios if you've ever heard of me it's probably for one of these videos I want to talk to you today about a problem that's been on my mind for several years that was made kind of acute when Donald Trump was elected I don't know how to talk to the right I have spent several stretches of my adult life trying to talk to the right from arguing with I'm arguing at lunch with my conservative friends in high school to arguing with them on Facebook when they all grew up to be tea partiers to debating with Republican relatives of family reunions and to spending a lot of 2015 trying to have conversation with angry anti-feminist gamers and out of the at least hundreds of hours that I spent talking to the right and the dozen or so conversational tactics I've tried I can say that the number of times I actually changed somebody's mind was maybe once so eventually I gave up it was kind of a crappy batting average but I'm the kind of person who can only shut down because he's overwhelmed for so long and at the end of the day I'm not going to stop feeling overwhelmed until I'm doing something about the problem so I went back to the library after the after seeing the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the outright I went back to the library so last year I started a new video series called the alt-right playbook it's a collection and dissection of the rhetorical tactics the far-right uses to legitimize itself and to gain influence over the Republican Party if that sounds like a good time please like share and subscribe so far every episode ends with a don't I detail a mode of argument and then I say if you see someone arguing in this mode don't argue with them but in a broad sense the series is my attempt to solve this problem I don't think you can solve a problem you don't understand and I don't think you can talk to the right in any useful fashion if you don't know why what you've been trying hasn't been working so my long-term goal through the series is to end not with a don't but with a collection of dues a video detailing some of the best practices for dealing with the right what I want to talk about today is essentially what that video would be if I were making it right now so I want to call this talk getting past the outright playbook but I have to disclaim this is a work in progress I'm still studying the problem I don't have all the answers in fact a few months from now and they look back at this presentation and say wow I had like none of the answers so we're gonna proceed in a spirit of exploration we are figuring this out together this is what I'm confident in right now and whatever I say at the end of the series will at least be informed by what I say today one last thing before we begin I get this comment a fair bit mostly from Republicans who feel that they have been on by my videos and it doesn't seem anything I say is going to change their feelings about that but sometimes I get it from people I consider to be on my side and I actually recently got it from someone very dear to me whose politics I greatly admire so I think it's worth addressing there is a sense these days that if you say a person has bad politics you're also saying that they're a bad person like but if somebody votes for a shitty candidate they're also probably like a shitty boyfriend and to some degree I think that's appropriate like a person who a person is politically and who they are personally are not separate and we shouldn't treat them as such but you know the personal is political and all that but I think it's silly to act as if a person with junk politics therefore has no value whatsoever if I still lived in the same city as my tea party friends I don't doubt that they'd be the kinds of pals who would no questions asked call out of work to help me move on a Monday but they'd also vote to take away my health care on a Tuesday and the calculus by which someone weighs those two things to determine whether or not they're a good person just isn't that interesting to me I don't think one of these things negates or redeems the other people are more complicated than that so I'm not in the business of judging a person's humanity I'm also not going to pretend the taking away my health care isn't personal for many the idea that I can tell someone you are not only wrong but your ideas but your beliefs are doing measurable harm and still see them as a complete human will not compute but for the record I don't have trouble with so let's get into it whenever something like Trump happens I feel like there's this wave of shame on the left this is our fault we didn't talk enough to the other side now look what happened and there is this big redoubling of our efforts to try to converse more speak up disagree more and I feel that there are things the left considers appropriate when talking to the right and when this redoubling happens we don't change up our tactics we just do the same things only more so here are some things the left does that I suspect either don't work or are of only limited use debates to people of differing opinions agree to discuss their beliefs in public because debates are public they tend to be highly performative it's not an either speakers best interest to just fully change their positions in front of an audience so the aim is not to change the mind of the person you're speaking with it's a change however many minds in the audience is possible we do this out of the faith that the truer argument will be the most convincing argument here's the catch your average viewer of a debate is going to come in with two biases first that the subject is worth debating in the first place that if you put bill nye against a creationist you are implying that evolution and creationism are on roughly equal footing second is the bias towards the status quo the average viewer is going to reflexively identify with whichever position is closer to their experience whomever represents the status quo is going to win over more of the audience if the debate is again Bill Nye and a creationist the crowd is going to overwhelmingly side with Bill Nye but the creationist doesn't care standing next to Bill Nye makes them look respectable and if they swing even a handful of people to their side they grew their numbers by a little bit meanwhile evolutionary science gains basically nothing this is part of the long-term game of mainstreaming of theory a fringe belief but on the flip side if the debate is are trans women women then the status quo position is sadly in this country No and the person arguing yes is going to need more out of that debate than just a handful of converts and a bit more legitimacy because the difference between a trans activist and a creationist is creationists don't get murdered for being creationists and when those are the stakes a debate where a few people swing to your side but everyone else feels even more strongly that trans women aren't women isn't really a net gain about the only time I recommend a public debate is when it's damage control you've been invited into a debate that you know is going to happen with or without you and you know that you will do less harm than whoever is next on their list and even then I might change my mind in a month so number two public rebuttals somebody says something wrong hateful or just poorly reasoned and you make a post or a video or a tweet storm explaining why it's wrong we typically start a rebuttal by illustrating the other person's argument and then going into detail about its flaws and ramifications the problem we run into here is a certain cognitive bias that everybody contends with and it's called anchoring this is the tendency to latch on too tightly to the first thing someone says so if you start things off with someone else's argument you're actually doing them a favor because readers remember headlines better than they remember bodies of text and this is a pretty standard format for liberal think pieces how many articles have you read that is climate change a hoax our queer TV characters tokens I am guilty of this myself I made a video that was pretty much structured as has cultivation Theory been disproven so ok if you know better it is law you know that the answer to all these questions is no but this format which we fall into because it makes us look really even-handed actually weakens our arguments you'll notice that the alt-right doesn't write this way when Richard Spencer titles an article is black genocide right his answer is yes he titles his article with what he wants you to agree with he doesn't care if the article itself doesn't support this because he knows his readers won't remember most of the content and I found that most often when the right makes an argument they expect you to respond using the rebuttal format if you just write a piece about a queer character on TV and it's just clear that they aren't a token if you don't frame that as a counter-argument if you don't Center their debate they will claim you haven't responded they won't recognize any argument that doesn't incidentally spread their rhetoric number three is meeting people where they're at so there are some studies going around that argue that if you do some work to reframe progressive ideas into more conservative language you can get a bit more traction with the right for example if you frame climate science not in conservationist terms but in more like military terms conservatives are a bit more receptive to it so we must defend our vital resources from the horrific encroachment of bloody bloody bomb I am extremely wary of this method primarily because it assumes that the problem with progressive ideals is that they haven't been fit into a conservative worldview but what if the problem isn't a failure of communication what if the problem is the worldview because making climate science palatable by playing to the rights militarism kind of shoots us in the foot when we also have to say we need to end the war on terror or not provoke North Korea or work toward some kind of sustainable peace in Israel the rights militarism is one of the things we're trying to combat and this makes it extremely hard for progressivism to be intersectional because now climatologists have to throw peace activists under the bus number four is sunlight it still sometimes I still sometimes come across the argument that sunlight is the best disinfectant that if you just give awful people a microphone they will expose themselves is so obviously wrong and reprehensible that they will end their own careers I think by 2018 we should be pretty done with this idea I'm not sure it was ever true but it especially isn't true in the era of partisan news networks and curated feeds whether or not something is a scandal or an embarrassment depends on how your chosen news source contextualizes it and if they and that's if they tell you about it at all if a scandal is an on fox news Republicans won't even know that it happened and even when people know the horrible truth if they are invested enough in a person or a platform or a narrative they will find ways to be a okay with it in the age of Trump I think there is such a thing as too much rope to hang yourself and finally snappy metaphors there is a certain type of article that when a good one gets written tends to circulate in liberal circles the ones that really cleverly explain some complex idea like institutional racism and you know as a guy who explains complex stuff on the internet as a career I will never say no to a good metaphor but these tend to be the same handful of arguments wrapped up in new metaphors every time and I can never shake the idea that when one of these things makes the round there's this underlying assumption that if we could just share the right metaphor about racism far enough and wide enough white people would finally get it and you know these articles can be useful for educating people already predisposition to listen to you just because someone's on your side and fighting racism doesn't mean they actually understand racism having many times in my life been the ignorant white Ally I can vouch for the usefulness of these articles but there is this pervasive sense on the part of some liberals that racism is just a big misunderstanding and I just kind of want to sit people down and ask them what lesson do you think white supremacy needs to learn that losing two of the bloodiest wars in US history didn't already teach them what language do you think you're going to find that hasn't already been articulated by a Luo codes hooks lord King excuse truth Douglas Tubman or hundreds of other writers and poets over the last two centuries if on some level you feel that racism still exists exists just because black people haven't found the right words to advocate for themselves I'm just gonna throw it out there you might be white [Music] and finally empathy I know I said finally before is double finally I'm not gonna be the guy who advocates against empathy a repeated phrase on my channel as empathy is a beautiful thing but and truly and it is a beautiful thing but in all my conversations with conservatives and reactionary I found that if someone came at me with anger and condescension and I responded in kind the whole experience was miserable but if I responded with patience and generosity and empathy I could diffuse some of that anger and the conversation would be a lot more tolerable but it was always the same conversation I had my position they had theirs we both felt duty-bound to talk to each other but nothing ever came of it how much empathy I used only determined how awful I felt at the end of it now when people say that the most important tool for talking to the right is empathy it seems that they want the conversation to be more human they don't expect it to be more productive so i'm not selling empathy out I'm sure whatever techniques actually work will work better if empathy is involved but empathy is not something you owe to strangers and in my experience a lot of the time people you argue it will conflate empathy with validation if you don't treat their belief in the Jewish conspiracy as equally valid to your belief in not that they will call you cold and condescending so by all means if you have it in you to be empathetic be empathetic but don't expect empathy to do the work for you don't expect it to be recognized and don't let them define what counts as empathy one last thing so here we go you see someone saying something false or bigoted or misleading and you want to push back against it before you do ask yourself a question what are you trying to accomplish are you trying to debunk or persuade these are different things and they require different methods you don't do yourself any favors if you mix them up debunking is about correcting lies and putting arguments into context it's very outwardly focused and you are trying some has made a claim before an audience and you are trying to reach that audience before they are led astray or maybe fortify others against the argument before they adherent this definitionally needs to be done in public you need as many people to hear you as possible persuasion is when you actually tried to change the mind of the person who makes the claim this can be a very tricky proposition depending on how far their beliefs are from yours it is sensitive delicate work that requires a much greater that exists on the other person's feelings and should almost always be done in crowds so debunking the right if you are trying to debunk the right something must always keep in mind is this is not a debate I've already said my piece on why debates are ineffective and since you don't want to have one as much as possible a debunking should not involve the person being debunked it is somewhat valuable to have dissenting comments under like an ableist magazine article it is more valuable to write your own article I've also explained that you should avoid the rebuttal format one of the reasons for that is this thing called the backfire effect the tendency for rebuttals to make people believe the original argument even stronger essentially if there's a person there's a lie that a person has heard many times hearing it again even in the context of having it disproven reinforces the lie also if a liar misconception is core to someone's moral philosophy proof that it's untrue will often make them cling all the more tightly to it because their sense of self is being threatened you've probably heard of that that's cognitive dissonance now there's a decent amount of research into the backfire effect there's also a decent amount of research that says despite repeated attempts people couldn't verify that it even actually exists so where and how it happens is still being figured out but there are some best practices here's how every episode of the alt-right playbook is structured we begin with a hypothetical based on an actual event or sometimes an amalgamation of a few but with the details left out that's so people have to focus on the thrust of the argument rather than nitpicking it this example is always framed through a progressive lens here is what literally happened and here is a reasonable appropriate response then we explain how conservatives or reactionaries enter that conversation and how their behavior is from our perspective sometimes baffling and then we cover how the left tends to interpret the right and what our default responses tend to be and then only then do we talk about what the right is actually doing and what they actually believe the key here is that we do not start with a bad argument and then explain why it's bad we start with the truth we should treat the truth as normal we should establish the truth so strongly that by the time we get to the lie the fact that it's a lie should be obvious you frame the conversation from your perspective not from there sometimes not always but sometimes you don't even need to acknowledge their perspective you are allowed to talk about progressive tax policies without repeating whatever nonsense Jeff Sessions or Mike Pence said this week here's why the bunking is important in the pre-internet days if your racist uncle said something messed up at dinner there would be an awkward silence and everyone would shift in their chairs and eventually someone would change the subject your uncle might be a racist but at least he knows in that moment no one agreed with him the problem with that interaction happening online is no one knows whether the silence is awkward or not if someone says something bigoted and no one acknowledges it we don't see the shifting in the chairs people will interpret that silence however they want in fact standard etiquette on the far-right is to say awful things in such a way that different people have different reads on the silence they want the people who disagree with them to think that they're just being edgy that the reason no one is responding is because of course everyone disagrees but they're just not going to feed the trolls but the people who agree they want them to think they're serious and the reason no one's responding is because what they say is so self-evident ly true bigotry relies on the assumption that every racist sexist and homophobic majority that the far-right troll is the only one who will say out loud what deep down everyone believes this is why largely on moderated forums like Reddit neogaf and chan boards are a hotbed of recruitment for white nationalists and men's rights activists places where the real bigots can blend in with the ironic ones so one way to deal with the freedom to interpret silence is to remove silence by speaking up you disabuse people of the idea that everyone agrees with the bigot you just have to be smart about it you can't just tell the truth you have to frame it properly and you have to distance the bigot from the conversation as much as possible if you want some actionable advice on how to do that hang tight until I eventually make that video because I'm still figuring it out sorry okay so persuading the right if you were trying to persuade a person on the right you should first ask yourself three questions one does this person know me are they a relative colleague classmate friend two does this person respect me are you a Twitter personality they admire are they a fan of your video essays three do I have authority over this person you outrank them at work or do they post on a forum where you're a moderator the more yeses you can give the more reasons they have to listen to you if you're someone they know they might trust you if you're someone they respect they might want to be more like you if you're someone with authority they might worry about repercussions if they don't listen if you are none of those things what are you you're a stranger on the Internet we often assume otherwise people don't act solely in their self-interest they act on their beliefs people don't only support the far-right policies because they have been lied to they do it because right or wrong they believe in something and part of being a human is having your beliefs change over time but ask yourself how many times have your core beliefs changed because of a conversation with a stranger on the internet myself I like talking to strangers online but how productive that conversation is depends on how closely aligned our beliefs are if I talk to you about where we should set the marginal tax rate that may be a good conversation if we have the same base assumptions about the role of taxes in society but if I talk to someone on the right and they don't share my base assumption that government should collect taxes to pay for government services and public well-being then I may think we're talking about the most efficient tax rate but we're actually talking about whether all taxation is theft and I'm going to have to play detective just to figure out why are our beliefs even diverge we're dealing with a much more fundamental belief and those beliefs are the ones that don't shift quickly to move someone politically you have to be in a position to move them and most strangers on the internet aren't always remember there are minds that can be changed and there are mines that can't and there are mines that can be changed but not by you not learning the difference is a massive waste of energy another unfortunate thing you have to ask yourself before engaging is is this person a danger to anyone something that had to be explained to me is that a common way for people to vent their frustrations online about minority politics is to harass the various icons of those politics they often don't even view this as harassment because they're thinking of these folks usually women in people of color as concepts not people and if you get this person all riled up about women in video games they may not go after you but they may still go after someone but if everything checks out if you are in a position to reach them and you know that they are not the harassing type or the type that hangs out with harassing types maybe then is the time to break out the empathy it's going to be a private conversation it's probably going to take a lot of time and it's going to be a lot of unpaid emotional labor but if you've got the mana for it it is worth doing now if you have that conversation and you use all the knowledge and sensitivity in the world and it seems like the person still isn't changed don't completely lose hope maybe they're too far gone but also shifting a core belief is almost never an event it's a process accepting that beliefs they've held for years might be harmful or recognizing that that icon of social politics is actually a living breathing human being those things take many points of contact say for the sake of argument it's a hundred points of contact maybe you were just number thirty five thirty five is just as important is 99 it's just not as satisfying so take your ego out of it set aside your desire to win an argument just do what you can and move on finally a quick question what are the places in the US where citizens don't have full voting rights prisons DC the territories Guam Puerto Rico American Samoa the Mariana and Virgin Islands but all these places have in common well they're all places Republicans really don't want to give the folk - and they're all majority non-white so please keep it in perspective if a fraction of the effort spent having facebook arguments with Republicans was spent on combating voter suppression gerrymandering and ex-con disenfranchisement and on statehood for DC and Puerto Rico we wouldn't need to talk to the right very often Millennials are one of the most progressive generations in history the Republican base is Dingling and they know it the only republican president to win the popular vote since the 80s was george w s re-election and if popular vote counted for anything he would have been up for reelection in the first place which means if not for gaming the electoral college we wouldn't have had a Republican in the White House in over 25 years the only way the right stays in power is by making themselves disproportionately represented fix that and we can make the world better without their permission does that mean don't talk to them of course not I don't really believe in fighting the good fight on only one front the minds that can be chained changed need to be changed the mines that can't be changed need to be outnumbered and the voices that aren't being represented need to be elevated we need all of it but it can feel antithetical to liberal values to say look this is the direction the country needs to go you can either get on board or be left behind it can seem downright undemocratic to drag people into a world they don't want though I will point out the right has no qualms doing it to us all I can say is that people are adaptable look at how many people screamed bloody murder about how Obamacare was going to lead to a socialist revolution and now gutting it is one of the most unpopular moves Congress has ever made if you make the world better around people they will get used to it white people didn't learn that saying the n-word was transgressive because we sat down every white person one by one and convinced them they just realized that saying it would make people think they're and much as we'd like to believe the desire to do good is a strong motivator and even stronger one is the desire to not be thought an so everyone on some level feels this pressure to be normal to be acceptable in fact the right feels this even more strongly than the left and maybe shouldn't surprise us that the party that stumps for the status quo would be the most invested in being the status quo and when somebody gets the sense that something they thought they should hate is broadly accepted or something they used to be taboo something that they used to do is now taboo most of them will shut their mouths as quickly as possible it may not change their minds but it can change their behavior now you must be thinking Ian that's not true this whole situation today is a backlash against the first black president and yes it is but that story can be misleading because when Norns changed the people who go along with it do so quietly the people who plant their feet and push back to do so as loudly as possible the far right knows that the political mainstreaming of a black man a woman and a Jewish class warrior is bad for them and they are trying to reassert their definition of status quo because if they can bring casual bigotry back as a social norm all those people who quietly drifted away when it seemed taboo will quietly drift back and bringing back old norms is what make America great again means so please do the work of changing minds but do the other work as well it's all part of the way forward that that's what I got I don't think that fully answered this question the question of how do you talk to the right at least not to my satisfaction and probably not to yours but I hope at least that if any of this was new to you we all have a better understanding of what the problem even is thank you okay yeah any questions so the question was how does trust enter into the dialogue I mean I think Trust is similar to empathy like those three questions that you should ask before before you have a conversation with a person on the right if you're trying to persuade them are basically questions of trust I mean authority is more a question of like fear of repercussion but again like Trust is a thing that's nearly impossible to establish over the Internet I mean if you have a friendship with someone that predates the interaction then yes but yeah I think I think Trust is very much the same thing as as like empathy as any human interaction it requires an actual human relationship with the person that they respect so the question was have I talked to any people who've switched positions um it's really hard to say because I don't always know when I talk to someone if there's someone who has switched positions I have read and watched videos of people who have studied that phenomenon and that's sort of where the hundred points of contact idea comes from in most cases the people who have switched positions usually did so as a slow evolution over the course of time as opposed to like they had one big epiphany moment although a lot of the time there is an epiphany moment it's just usually a culminating moment of an ongoing process there's the great article written that was like of white neo-nazi who had exited neo-nazi dumb and his explanation was that like it was a very very long process but there was also this moment which was like he had a Jewish boss who did him a solid and that was like the moment that was like the Domino that finally tipped but obviously if that had happened a year earlier wouldn't had the same effect so the question was about sort of single issue conservatives like someone who is for all intents and purposes a progressive except for a single issue that makes them vote Republican that's gonna be one of those areas where I'm gonna say I don't know I'm still working on it sorry you and then you so the question was about is there a difference in age is it easier to talk to people of a certain age group than of another age group um I feel like it'd be very hard to make a sweeping statement about that right like there may be certain populations where older people are easier to talk to the younger people there may be other areas where younger people are easier to talk to than older people um I think there's definitely sort of like I feel like grandparents are more willing to listen to their grandkids than their kids a lot of the time um and there's may be more of a feeling of like whatever I've lived my life so I don't need to get as riled up when when the the young uns are saying their stuff but yeah I don't know I also feel like my grandparents are usually very set in their ways and they may listen to me but that doesn't mean they're gonna vote differently and then so the savings more of a statement than a question but I agree is the idea that some people not all the right is the same maybe not even all the right should be considered the right and that some people can be engaged with and some people cannot and maybe should not and I do agree I do think that like I said some people are too far gone I I don't really think there's much value in talking to Nazis from a persuasive angle I think talking to them from a debunking angle not talking to them talking around them from a debunking angle is valuable um but the thing about people falling under one umbrella like the reason why it's called the alright playbook even though a lot of the time it's talking about the right at large is because to use an eSports analogy um I kind of feel like the alt-right is controlling the meta of conservative politics right now basically the idea is that they are not necessarily the most powerful thing on the right but they are currently the most disproportionately influential element on the right their rhetoric is very very directly tailored to seep into Republican rhetoric at large which means your average Republican may not be a neo-nazi but they are very possibly spouting you Nazi rhetoric without even realizing it and that is part of the plan that is part of mainstreaming their opinions which is why sometimes it is useful for me to refer to the alt right and the right interchangeably because whether or not they are the same group and it's important to draw the distinction in certain instances they are often using the same rhetoric and when you're trying to deal with that rhetoric you need to recognize how pervasive it is I think

Channel: Indivisible Somerville

Views: 51,215

Rating: 4.4735932 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: j6GFKo6_sOU

Length: 34min 45sec (2085 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Angelsaremathmatical]

It's good but like he says, it's an early draft. I look forward to the finished product.

[u/musingsofmadman]

I wish this channel put out more content. There are several breadtubers that I wished put out content on like a weekly basis. I understand that due to stylistic choices (i.e. ContraPoints production work, Innuendo's drawings, etc.) make it really hard.

[u/odious_odes]

I really appreciated his breakdown of the structure he uses for the Playbook videos -- a way to break down a bad argument without stating the argument first.

[u/Aikidi]

I love his videos, "why are you so angry" is one of the best breakdowns of angry internet dudes I've ever seen

[u/HumanBehaviorByBjork]

Man he got thicc since "ass danced off by danskin"

Lookin good Ian!

[u/AldoPeck]

Fuuuuuuuuuck this guy. Just a white knight ankle humper. Surprised he hasn't been arrested for sexual assault yet like all these other mutants that spent the last 3 years defending every internet-feminist grifter.

[u/dogGirl666]

Does Innuendo Studios have its own subreddit? I tried search but I am not good at reddit-search.