ARR: let's talk about your book 

LB: cool yeah 

ARR: so thanks for joining uh the podcast uh i was uh sent a copy of your new book uh out through nyu press called rules for reactionaries how to maintain inequality and stop social justice and i thought i think this publicist has the wrong email address um uh but it turns out this is like uh this is a study of the ways that reactionary uh rhetors or rhetoric um basically tries to flip the script right and and uh and so it's a pretty uh it's a it's a not at all an intimidating book it's uh it's a you know um i wouldn't call it a light read but it's not very dense um and uh you um are able to condense a whole lot of very interesting material in a in a readable fashion so um i enjoyed reading it what uh what prompted you to write it?

LB: yeah um i guess a couple different things uh one i was trying to get at the ways in which we as a society are kind of stuck in this time loop uh year after year we just keep seem to having the same conversations. You know, if, if people are, are watching cable news or listen to conservative talk radio, um, or just having conversations with the people around them, uh, the, they often have the same conversations. I, you know, I have these conversations with students on a regular basis or, or family friends or just family, uh, you know, oh, doesn't talking about race make it worse? Or, you know, I never, you know, mistreated black people, or I never owned any slaves or whatever, you know, you know, the same talking points, right? And we keep hearing that over and over again. Or, you know, one of the anecdotes I gave early on in the book, I think, is I was, it was around summer of 2020. And I heard somebody on NPR saying, oh, well, you know, we have the George Floyd protests happening. This is going to be the flashpoint that is going to allow us to have that national conversation on race. Surely everything's going to get better now. And I was like, I've heard that before. I heard that about Tamir Rice. I heard about that about Travion Martin. I heard that about the beer summit. I keep hearing the same thing and things don't necessarily get better. And why do we keep having the same conversation and nothing progresses? So that was one thing that kind of instigated it is we keep getting stuck in these time loops and things don't get moved forward. The other thing that had happened was in 2015, before Trump launched into his presidential campaign, I was teaching a class called U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness. And a student who wasn't in my class had seen my syllabus, actually just seen the title of my class, hadn't even really seen the syllabus, but she saw like the book list, like two or three of the books that I was teaching, and she saw the titles of them. And she got on Fox News and it caused neo-Nazis to protest me and got a bunch of hate mail. And because of that, a lot of the hate mail, it basically didn't just say, oh, you know, we hope you die. And, you know, we hope somebody, you know, curb stomps you, which it did. But it also called me a bunch of like homophobic slurs and other things. And I'm not gay. But it also, when in those attacks on my masculinity and attacks on my sexuality, it made me think, okay, what are the overlaps between white supremacy and men's rights, anti-feminism and heterosexism. And so I was realizing that there are actually a lot of similar rhetorical strategies between these different movements. And so that was the other impetus for the book. 

ARR: Yeah, that's, that's wild. I definitely, especially like, I don't, I don't find in my normal sort of course of, you know, chatting with people up here in the portland area you know much in the way of like what you're talking about but as somebody from the south it definitely resonates about all those kinds of strategies and and how um uh concepts are sort of trivialized or or marginalized you know but also like what you're saying about uh the media sort of jumping onto idealistic trends and waves like i remember for example uh in 2008 after obama was elected it was even i think before obama was elected the media was announcing the post-racial you know united states post-racist post-racial nobody's thinking about race because we've got barack obama running you know uh and then he won and it's like everybody is cool now um if we just elect him it'll all be over that's the promise Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, that did not happen. 

LB: So, so yeah, so, you know, obviously, part of the reason, on the flip side of that, that white supremacism and basically reactionary politics, anti-democracy politics, has come roaring back is the way that they've been able to invert um a lot of uh talking points and uh um logical innovations and things like that and and turn it against the people who are developing them uh and the way that also that the media has uh to a degree been sort of i don't know naive in the way that it represents those inversions so um is that is that one of the reasons why it's like useful to have and read this book so we can kind of like get inoculated from the the sorts of ways of yeah i think one of the things i wanted people to take away was an ability to recognize the patterns right i wanted people to oh sorry my phone timer went off to remind me that it's my son's time to take medicine um yeah i wanted people to be able to recognize the patterns they see in conversations so that they don't think that they're coming across one of those talking points for the first time. And not just like individual people, but particularly journalists. I think journalists need that skill set so that they can interrupt those patterns and push back on them. But, you know, for example, you know, if somebody says to me, oh, doesn't talking about race make it worse? I've had that conversation for the last 20 something years on a regular basis. So when somebody says that to me, I'm like, oh, thank you so much. Like you've just teed up the biggest softball in my life. If you say that to me, and if you say that to me in front of 30 people, I will thank you. I will say, oh, this is the most beautiful gift you've ever given to me because I have like four different answers that I can give. And maybe I will change your mind, but I will lay out a buffet of all these different ways to answer in front of the other people, right? But if the other, if somebody hears that for the first time, they will have no way of answering it. And so if they don't think through and if they just say, oh, well, that's a great thing that I've never heard of before. And they don't recognize it as a pattern of behavior or rhetorical pattern, they just go, oh, wow, I never thought about that. That must be true. Or one that, you know, people commonly get, which is, you know, a talking point that Eduardo Bonilla Silva talks about, which is, oh, you know, I lost a job to a black man. Or, you know, my son or daughter didn't get into college because of X minority, right? You know, these are talking points that people circulate in the United States and probably elsewhere, I don't know, but circulate on a regular basis, these are mythologies, right? But because they circulate as truth-denying truisms, as Patricia Williams would describe, and we don't push back on them, that's a problem. 

ARR: Right. I do agree. This is an important fact. You have to sort of pay attention to what's true and what isn't right like that's that's sort of like where our conversations ought to at least like have their grounding right that's the basis that they should start out with and so often what we're finding is that people who are not actually recognizing the truth that's right in front of their faces for a variety of reasons often you know narcissism what do they say about the nationalism that it's collective egoism right yeah yeah these sorts of like attitudes and feelings and and inability to like you know rise above those, um, those things. Um, these are like, uh, the, the things that kind of deflect people from the truth. Right. And so I think there's a important, um, problem when people who can't who actually like maybe either they know it or they don't but they avoid the truth and then they don't get what they want and then they blame other people instead of thinking Òoh well maybe i don't have it all right in my headÓ you know what i mean 

LB: so yeah or it provides them like an emotional or psychological self right it it provides them an emotional truth for a temporary moment right oh yeah you know johnny didn't get into college because of something else but maybe johnny doesn't do the work that johnny needs to do maybe johnny's not as special as johnny thinks because like maybe maybe this other kid works his butt off or maybe whatever else um or maybe there's just it's really competitive and hard to get into college or maybe we've defunded higher education and there's like this really complex set of things and we don't understand how higher education is is funded in the united states yeah 

ARR: and maybe maybe life itself is actually complicated and difficult and as the rolling stones say you can't always get what you want um so so yeah i think uh and privilege also plays a part in it right you when you don't get what you want but you're used to getting it you blame other people instead of realizing that life is hard right um so i think there's a lot of things but how do you so how do you reconcile you know people say we're in like a post-truth environment or if we're talking about discourse and rhetoric and we're talking about well you have to have fact based understandings of things you have to have you know a mental model that aligns with reality whatever that is um how do you reconcile that with um ideas that are like truth is produced there is no big t truth and everyone has their own truths and that kind of thing i know this is kind of like a little bit off book and and erratic but 

LB: no i think it's totally fair um you know i i understand this idea that truth you know that there there is this tendency you know along the the the the 20th century and this this push towards post-modernism to say you know there is no truth. It's all socially constructed, but that's not, that doesn't mean that everything is completely fabricated, right? That means that we are perceiving things and your understanding of the world is going to be different than my understanding of the world. And we're not going to necessarily always align right at least that's the way in which i would approach that um it's not a complete it's not just that there's no objective reality at all um what i think we're trying to get at here is an understanding that we need to get back to some type of common ground right is that fair. And we need to do that by having some shared conversations. And, you know, I know when we were going back and forth before the interview, the podcast, you know, you were like, well, how do you sit down and have conversations with folks? You know, there are some folks that I would not have a conversation with, but there are some folks that I think are valuable to sit down and have conversation with. And it's whether or not I think it's worth sitting down and whether I think I can share a common ground with them. And if I don't think that we can occupy the same reality or not is part of that. Does that make sense? 

ARR: Yeah, totally. So yeah, it seems like a big part of what your book is sort of gearing geared toward is to have constructive conversations with people and like you're saying there are some people no you can't really deal with that and then there's some people um that you want to engage with so what are the so so you're saying having having a sense of a common ground is something that would determine who you would want to converse with and discuss this stuff with and maybe try to change their minds about some things and those who you wouldn't. Can you talk a little bit more about how you would parse that? 

LB: Absolutely. I think everybody's going to have a different understanding of who that is and when they're going to draw those lines. Throw it out there. I'm a white dude, cisgender heterosexual white dude um and that's going to shape who i'm going to engage and when i'm going to engage them um i also say that there are certain family members i feel uncomfortable i feel comfortable engaging in certain family members that maybe just kind of rub me raw a little bit and that like i can't keep my emotions in check is the way i would like to whereas my wife's much better about keeping herself in check whereas i can keep myself in check with her family better than she can with them. And so, like, you know, being able to gauge your emotional and psychological headspace, I think, is really important there. But, you know, we might take this from the, you know, who are the folks in the, like, the Twitter sphere, public media, and then we might take it all the way down to the more granular, familial, friendship, localized level, right? So if we're talking like at the bigger sphere, you know, would I sit down with Nick Fuentes? Absolutely not. That is not somebody I'm going to go try to convert. No, that is a waste of my time. But at the same time, engaging somebody like that is going to be a complete waste. But you and I were talking via email and there's that current debate right now amongst right wingers. You get this fracturing happening between somebody like James Lindsay and Christopher Ruffo about people like Nick Fuentes. I think we should be working that fracture. I think we should be working that fracture, not necessarily engaging and trying to win over somebody like James Lindsay, but making that fracture more legible to people who are listening to James Lindsay. So recognizing that there are multiple layers to audiences. Does that make sense? I don't think you're going to convert James Lindsay. And I think that there are multiple levels here because you don't know who he is or I don't know who he is. And you're not sitting down with him per se. But if you recognize that James Lindsay is your interlocutor, right, but there's another audience. So if you say, if you're speaking to James Lindsay on Twitter or in an interview, but you're actually not speaking to him, you're speaking with him, but you're actually speaking to an audience who's listening to you while you're speaking to him. Does that make sense? 

ARR: Yeah, totally. You're using the conversation with Lindsay to reach a third, fourth, or another group of people. right yeah right so what um so you you have like i think it's 12 um is it 12 13 actually no it's more dang it 15 so you have 15 uh um sort of main strategic devices i'll just call them that or rhetorical devices um that are used in reactionary discourse to kind of turn the tables so i was wondering um if you would uh go over just a a few of those uh for the audience and uh um so that they can get a sense of you know what kind of things to expect or you know 

LB: yeah yeah the the first one that i wrote about and it's i think the second or third one in the book is weaponization of victimhood um and honestly i i see it all the time and i i saw it earlier today on twitter and it just enraged me it's it's the one that probably makes me most upset in the world um and it's it's everything from the war on christmas to uh Men's rights activists saying that, you know, they are experiencing oppression by women because, you know, they can't get dates or they can't get access to domestic violence shelters or whatever. You know, so it's the appropriation of victimhood discourse in order to foment attacks on aggrieved communities. Earlier today, a colleague of mine, who's a professor here at Arizona State University, who I've had the fortune of never meeting, wrote a substack about the Brown shooting, Brown University shooting. And this is a professor here who's the, whatchamacallit, the faculty sponsor for TPUSA. And he noted that one of the victims of the shooting was a Republican, the president of the Republican Students Association or whatever it's called there. Um, and he was like, well, this is clearly a targeting of Christians and therefore Christians are victimized. And we need to recognize that, uh, Christians are being assaulted left and right on university campuses. And we need to, uh, crack down on anti-Christian violence on university campuses. So this is an example of the ways in which, you know, one incident happens. Now, this is obviously a tragic event. A young woman lost her life, but she's not the only person who lost her life in this event. Other people were hurt, but another man lost his life too. I don't know the details of him. And then, you know, she gets kind of turned from a three-dimensional human, a complex human into a trope right she gets transformed in this way into a rhetorical device and then she gets weaponized to strip away rights or to make claims for a larger political agenda and that's the same thing that happens when somebody says oh you know there's this war on christmas let's attack muslims let's attack jews let's do this other thing let's you know strip away the rights of this other community over here um so this is weaponization of victimhood uh narrative yeah 

ARR: definitely definitely seeing that a lot um and uh particularly it's aggravating when it's used to justify the move to aggression 

LB: yeah yeah 

ARR: because it's not even really like a defensive like hey this is happening it's like this is happening and we need to destroy um 

LB: that's exactly exactly the way it works right in 2015 trump comes down and uh from the escalator and says hey mexicans are are rapists they're not sent mexico's not sending its best and now we have ice agents and whatnot uh in masks in the street um not just assaulting immigrants but also assaulting american citizens 

ARR: right so um so there's something in rhetoric that also moves into action right can you can you uh uh do you ever talk about this uh um what is the relationship between rhetoric and action in your view and like i know there's some some theories of scripted violence where people you know who take the microphone and compel you know say go do this basically um or or they simply kind of like donald trump was doing the other day where he's like talking about ilhan omar and he's like and he's like we should get her out of here you know we should you know do this kind of stuff and he's not talking necessarily about the federal government he's talking about his mob of followers that he's speaking to and so like yeah what what is there what is the line between rhetoric and action if there is one and how is it crossed yeah 

LB: i mean i don't know if i talk about that explicitly in the project but i feel like rhetoric enables the action um it creates the the psychological underpinnings for it um and it enables the coalitions behind a lot of the actions. And in that chapter in particular, I talk about how the rhetoric of victimhood creates a lot of the coalitions that we've seen in the alt-right between groups like men's rights activists and white supremacists who had not always aligned together, whereas they start seeing them lump together and working together. But then you're talking about it in a slightly different way which is how do you go from words into direct mobilization right um and i think we might see that in that chapter where i start and i only do this very briefly because frankly it was not the most enjoyable part of the research and none of the research was enjoyable for this project but i talk about um some of the uh the mass shooters uh god elliot i can't remember his last name um rogers yes um yeah so he's a bit of an incel there's a little debate on whether or not people would consider him an incel i certainly would um but i read his manifesto and he positions himself as a victim um a victim of of women uh for not dating him right and he also internalizes white supremacy as a mixed race kid right um and so you see that victimization rhetoric and then the way in which it gets positioned into action 

ARR: yeah yeah um so one one question i wanted to ask is about the sort of maga movement in general we've been seeing reports about you know maybe people are leaving the maga movement um i'm not sure like whether or not that's true it seems like the data attests to it um but you know never you know count your chickens before they're hatched um but uh yeah what would you say about like trying to deal with like former MAGA people like is this is does this book you know provide uh useful strategies or healthy strategies for like uh trying to I guess um reason with people and bring them out of uh negative ways of thinking 

LB: i mean i think we have to um i was talking to somebody the other day about this i think one of the problems on the left has been this willingness to opt out, to say, I don't like X community, or I don't like the way in which so-and-so talks, and I'm not going to engage them. And I get that from certain folks. I totally get it. But as I said, I come from multiple privileged positions. I feel that it is incumbent upon myself to engage people because I find myself, because of those privileged positions, to be in the room where a lot of things happen, to borrow that line from Hamilton, the musical. And I need to be the person who, when something uncomfortable is said, to speak up and to say things. And also, for those of us who study the rite, I think a lot of us would do well to learn from those in the evangelical proselytizing tradition. I don't quite mean going door-to-door and proselytizing, but I don't not mean that either. I think we need to sell our ideas a bit, and I don't mean just waiting for Barack Obama to go and speak to 30,000 people once every four years. I think we need to go and have hard conversations. With people that we know and love. That doesn't mean selling our ideas to Nick Fuentes. That might mean having conversations with our cousins. That might mean knocking on doors every two years. That might mean driving people out every two years or every year. to vote. That might mean making calls, but it's a more committed approach. And it's not just voting, by the way. I use those voting as an example, but it really is having conversations. And, you know, again, I get why, you know, I get why some folks might not want to have a conversation, we need more folks who will um otherwise the options aren't great 

ARR: yeah i found that uh actually funny enough i've uh canvassed i used to canvas for five i canvassed for about five years in the portland area when i first moved here so i've probably knocked on almost every door in this town or definitely a majority of them um and it is uh it is uh pretty instructive what you learn from uh people around you and your neighbors and and when you're kind of forced to have conversations i was part of a local biodiversity group and when you're forced to have these conversations with people um it's actually often um uh a positive experience because you know you learn that people um you know don't want to be you know mean you know um even if they disagree with you on some things and you definitely more often than not they appreciate you know having a conversation and like being able to to discuss things um so you know i i i am kind of a believer in dialogue 

LB: for sure um yeah Yeah. 

ARR: Well, all right. So that was, speaking of dialogue, that was most of the questions that I have for you here. Do you have any closing thoughts, ideas about defeating? I mean, I think one of the things that you're talking about here in this book, where you're talking about hegemonic masculinity and aggrieved entitlement, you know, it's just stuff, you know, we've been over, you know, for, I mean, as long as we've been alive, more or less is kind of continuous issue. um but i do think that you sort of um encapsulated it really well and uh condensed it into um a number of uh sort of rules if you will yeah so um what do you think about uh this coming uh election um cycle next year do you think uh there's any way that's gonna end up being like a more positive experience? You think that having this book might be useful for people, say, who are canvassing door to door for their favored candidates or just trying to have these kinds of discussions? 

LB: Yeah, that's a great question. I hadn't thought about it that way in terms of folks who are canvassing and reading it. Yes, everybody who's canvassing should clearly have a copy and every and every candidate should buy it for them now i yeah actually it makes sense that that it would help um to at least be aware of the rules and to think about it that way um yeah i hadn't thought about it that way it does make sense i mean for me elections are both about rhetoric but they're also about institutions and how are the institutions going to step up and how are they going to organize right um i feel like our country is both on a precipice which is this really this it's obviously this this moment of danger which can be really scary but there's also this great potential i mean so much has been destroyed in terms of our institutions. And obviously, people should be terrified and distraught. Nobody should doubt that. The question is, what are we going to build next? Because we're going to have, we're not going back. The institutions that we've had, a lot of them have been torn apart. So what are we going to build next? And what are we going to reconstruct? I think that's probably the term we need to be thinking about. And what is democracy going to look like going forward? Both democracy in the sense of our institutions, but democracy in the way that we practice it. Is it going to be us versus them? Where we shut each other out, or are we going to reach across and try to engage one another? I'm not saying, you know, you mentioned like, what do we do with the MAGA's and the ex-MAGA's? I'm not saying that we should turn a blind eye to what's happened. But I think we should try to understand why what has happened has happened. And we should ask some serious questions of ourselves and of each other and try to understand where we're at. And I think that's fair. 

ARR: yeah yeah definitely so sort of like uh if we're if we're trying to accomplish something um you know in the public domain or something it's easier for many people to come together and this book can be useful to sort of try to who was it who said racism is a distraction -- just like having it having to deal with that constantly while you're trying to do the thing that makes you happy um so to kind of try to use this book to like deal with that and and and try to keep people on task doing things that matter um and then on the other hand there's like a politics of us versus them where you can organize against the bad person and then not be able to do the things that are important right so yeah and so and and this book came off to me as as something that's not particularly interested in that recognizing at the same time that like some some conversations are possible and some are not you know and and forcing the issue isn't going to really help it's going to drive people apart and cause fights and stuff but um but uh perhaps it can help as like a handbook to prepare people for things that will be said and then also have things to think about uh in ways to to deal with them you know on the spot right so that it's not just doesn't just make you angry 

LB: yeah yeah fair enough because because it can make you angry right yeah and i end the book by talking about sisyphus uh through camu right like you know You're not going to fix it all today and just recognize that this is the way the world is and just keep on grinding. That's my approach to it because if we're trying to fix racism by tomorrow at noon, you're not going to be happy. 

ARR: All right. Bummer. Bummer. 

LB: This is a disappointment to your listeners. 

ARR: we're gonna go kick rocks now um all right no so uh yeah thank you very much um professor bebo at uh arizona state university i hope you have a a great holiday season um and uh i enjoyed reading your book and um i definitely recommend it to people who want to you know something useful right? So yeah, this has been Right Rising, the podcast of Far Right Analysis Network. And I'm your host, Alexander Reed Ross. Thank you, Professor Bebo. Thank you.