Context Matters: How the Far Right Weaponizes Poor Media Literacy

Propagandists rely on people missing the bigger picture to smuggle insidious ideas into the mainstream

I’m on vacation this week so this piece won’t be entirely new material, nor is it exactly a rerun. This is an updated and expanded version of an article I wrote in July of last year titled Motte and Baloney. Fully new material resumes next week.

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A week or so ago, a tweet by Twitter heavy-user “Evan” caused more of a storm than usual. Evan isn’t a celebrity but he’s what people call a Large Account, someone with a lot of followers who is renowned for that alone. A self-described communist and fan of One Piece (I’ve never seen the anime so I have no idea if that’s non-sequitur). He retweeted this AI picture from “Giga Based Dad” and added this comment:

A lot of the people still using Twitter regularly are Elon Musk “western population” cultists who take visceral personal offense at any white person having fewer than 12 kids, but even a lot of normal people were taken aback also. What on Earth is fascist about this image?

There were a few different categories of objectors. There were those who were genuinely confused; there were those who were angry about the dilution of the term fascist to refer to happy families; and there were actual neo-Nazis who came to agree that this is fascism and thus rehabilitate the idea of fascism.

One can legitimately wonder what led Evan to make the leap to invoke fascism in response to a fairly innocuous picture of a couple and some kids, but a more important question is why was the tweet swarmed by so many fascists?

An easy answer is that Twitter is basically a Nazi site now so it’s like asking why there are so many ants in this ant nest, and yes that’s true but that’s not the complete answer.

But before we go on I first need to show you some Welsh castles.

Just bear with me here, okay?

There are a lot of different types of things that we call “castles” and the main thing they have in common is that they’re fortified. If you were to ask someone to draw a castle they would probably draw something like a very big house, like St Fagans.

Or if you’re picturing Disney, something tall with a lot of pointy towers, like Castle Coch.

If you’re picturing those tall walls with the square-zipper shaped battlements on the top then you might be thinking of a motte and bailey castle, like Castle Cardiff.

What you might be surprised about is that the inside of a motte and bailey is mostly empty, or at least unroofed. There’s no huge building here, just a powerful wall surrounding a lot of empty space. This is the bailey. The castle buildings themselves tend to be attached to the walls—imagine your house inverted, where the house completely surrounds the yard instead of the reverse.

The motte is a very solid fortified keep, either in the middle of the bailey or backed right up against something impassable like a mountain cliff. This is like the nucleus of the castle.

It’s tempting to describe the motte as “the real castle” just because it’s the roofed building part, but it isn’t. People don’t live in the motte. It’s tiny. The bailey is the castle, it’s the whole thing, everything inside those walls. Every part of the castle that is of any use to anybody is outside of that motte, out in the fresh air or in the living spaces against the walls.

But the motte becomes important when an enemy is coming to storm your castle, because the bailey is very difficult to protect. Sure, it’s got a big wall and a moat and whatever else, but once those walls are breached you are a sitting duck if you don’t have a motte. It’s useful for only one thing—it’s impregnability to assault.

That’s where you hide everybody when the enemy hordes come. You can’t live in the motte, you understand, but you can hide there safely until the enemy gets the hell out of your bailey because—and this is crucial—they can’t keep that either. They can’t just settle down in the fields below while you’re up there in the tower sniping at them. If they can’t take the motte then they have no choice but to retreat.

If they retreat far enough, you can even expand your own territory. Build another bailey, another wall. Grow outward as your people gain strength.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because the strategy of defending a motte and bailey castle is very similar to the way that fringe ideologues and conspiracy theorists defend their arguments. Intelligent and strategic operatives of the far right use it to smuggle and entrench their ideas into the mainstream like a despot swallowing the countryside.

The strategy relies on people having low media literacy and taking things at face value, failing to understand or recognise the greater context.

Here’s how it works:

Last year amidst the cinema-reviving double-hitter of Barbenheimer there premiered a rather vanilla and forgettable thriller called Sound of Freedom, about a former DHS agent, played by Jim Caviezel, shutting down a child sex trafficking ring.

Many noticed at the time that, for a movie with no huge names attached and nothing in particular going for it, Sound of Freedom was getting a bizarre amount of hype, and a lot of people online were getting very angry about anyone coming away from it with a less than stellar impression. There’s nothing too unusual about people getting really worked up about a movie, just check out the discourse around the DC cinematic universe and whether or not The Flash is garbage. But it’s uncommon that you risk being bombarded with death threats for giving a movie a bad review. Not unheard of, but uncommon.

That’s been the experience of Rolling Stone journalist Miles Klee after called the film “A Superhero Movie For Dads With Brainworms” in a review that frankly isn’t even that bad. He doesn’t go full Roger Ebert on the damn thing, but he does gouge at its plot holes and make fun of its bombastry.

People just took it really, really personally if you dissed this movie. You’d receive torrents of accusations, as Klee did, that you are a pedophile who has just unwittingly outed yourself. It seemed something else was driving the urgency for this movie to be seen as a critically untouchable masterpiece to the extent that somebody was even buying every unsold ticket to give the statistical impression that it was a huge hit. And if anyone questioned why those sold-out theaters were mostly empty…

There was a very strong impression that something nefarious was going on with this movie. But there’s the catch—if you tried to find out what was so strange about Sound of Freedom then its defenders would treat you like the weird one. Why are you bashing this movie? Why are you fixated on an ordinary Hollywood thriller that you yourself are insisting isn’t even anything special? What’s wrong with you? Again—are you a pedophile or something?

And around and around we go.

For those savvy enough to see the context in which this movie was produced and promoted, it quickly became clear that this entire project was a motte and bailey trick to smuggle QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories and ideology into the mainstream. Sound of Freedom isn’t explicitly Pizzagate: The movie—Jim Caviezel doesn’t chase Hillary Clinton back to Comet Ping Pong and storm the catacombs—but the greater context of the state of conspiracy culture over the past decade permeates every aspect of it. Both Caviezel himself and Tim Ballard, the real man on whom Caviezel’s character is based, are prominent and firm believers of the QAnon/Pizzagate cultural meme.

This is the bailey that they live in. This is not just incidental. The entire reason a mid-budget movie that looks like something that comes with your Amazon Prime subscription was holding its own against a goddamn Indiana Jones sequel at the box office is because of the context of the conspiracy umbrella theory in which it lives.

The problem that deep believers in QAnon conspiracy theories face is that it is bananas. Not everyone believes all of the same things, of course (one satellite theory involves John F. Kennedy Jr still being alive and, variously, either is the cult leader known as Q, or changed his identity and is Donald Trump). But the core claim is always the same—that the world is in the yoke of a massive, powerful network of child killers whose almost single-minded mission is the sexual molestation, ethical corruption, and murder of children. Your children. There are hundreds of millions of these predators and they infiltrate all levels of power and control the entertainment industry.

JFK Jr always had better hair, even back when Donald’s was still real

Proving this mammoth industry exists is a monumental task. It’s extremely easy to attack on the grounds of its absurdity. This bailey can’t be protected. What the true believer needs to do is retreat to the motte.

The motte, in this case, is that pedophiles exist. Child sex trafficking exists.

And it does. This motte is impenetrable. It is very, very sturdy, because you cannot argue there are no such things as pedophiles, or kidnappers, or child slavery, or any of that stuff. Not would you try. It incontrovertibly all exists.

Here’s where the nefarious secret of Sound of Freedom lies: The deliberate strategy of its creators and promoters is to convince people that all of this belongs to the same castle. If you are attacking the castle, you have to attack the whole castle. That if you attack any aspect of the bailey, whether it’s Tim Ballard’s claims or the pizza shop stuff or that Donald Trump is JFK in a stupid ugly wig, then what you’re really attacking is the idea that there is any child abuse of any kind anywhere in the world. And then you’re the crazy one.

The fear of a widespread and well connected child abuse network isn’t just a QAnon thing, that’s just the face it currently wears. It’s a fear as old as time. It’s the Satanic Panic, it’s the witches of Salem, it’s vampires, and it’s the blood libel of the Jews. You obviously don’t have to be right wing, politically, to oppose child abuse, but this specific fear is a xenophobic one, it’s the ultimate fear of the far right in-group.

Convincing the masses, the “normies,” of all this is key to establishing populist authoritarian control of the people, expelling the outgroup by force of cultural pressure or even genocide. And tricks like the motte and bailey doctrine are part of the toolkit—because we keep falling for them.

Let’s take another example. Consider the phrase “It’s Okay to Be White.”

There shouldn’t be anything alarming about that statement, surely, given how many white people there are running around. None of them chose to be white and, even if they could, it’s meaningless to say it is or isn’t okay to be any race or skin colour. This statement is a very stable and comfortable motte.

Back in 2018, Australian senator Pauline Hanson tried to have this statement actually written into national law, by introducing a bill into parliament that merely asked the government to affirm that it is, in actual fact, okay to be white. The bill was defeated, but not because the statement was incorrect—and, in fact, it came very close to passing because it’s not incorrect. It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s not incorrect.

There has never been a Karener Karen

But I’ve told you that it’s a motte, so what’s the bailey?

Pauline Hanson is a white nationalist. Probably the most prominent and mainstream white nationalist in Australia. She rejects the term, probably earnestly as there are arguable distinctions between what she is and the implied white supremacy of that label, but the hardline anti-immigration stances and borderline apartheid-esque positions on Asian people that have broadly defined her career squarely position her, in my opinion, as a white nationalist by definition.

The purpose of trying to force the Australian government to affirm the statement “It’s Okay to Be White”—and, especially, causing discomfort by doing so—is a deliberate and insidious rhetorical trap. She sets this phrase up as being the core and nucleus of her entire politic. And an attack on any of her other views is an attack on the same castle. The motte and bailey trick is that if you attack any of her White Australia policies, what you’re really attacking is the statement that it’s okay to be white. Then you’re the bigot.

Hanson didn’t just pull that phrase out of her arse, by the way. It is a well known slogan that originated on white supremacist 4Chan boards with this specific conscious intent. I’m not making presumptions, it’s a proven strategy, we have screenshots, we have the receipts.

Importantly, the motte and bailey isn’t purely a defensive position, despite what its imagery may invoke. The first victory is establishing the motte in the first place. The purpose, ultimately, is to expand outward as your attackers fall back. You create new walls to fortify the ever expanding bailey. If this wasn’t the purpose, then they wouldn’t need to astroturf movie screenings to force everyone to acknowledge Sound of Freedom.

When you see It’s Okay to Be White posters hanging up around university campuses, their intended purpose is to be torn down or protested by people who understand the context and know that they were put there by white nationalists or supremacists. Those who don’t know this context think you’re attacking the statement itself. The hope for the trolls who put it there hope that the casual observer will be attracted to their position and think, hell, maybe some of their other ideas are worth listening to as well. You know… the other ideas.

You fall back away from the motte, they embark forward. You fall back from attacking the central conceit of a conspiracy movie, they start slipping in casual references to harvesting children’s brains to get out their adrenal glands, and it bizarrely becomes part of the normal discourse.

So we come back to Giga Based Dad and his perfectly normal AI fantasy:

What could possibly lead Evan to believe that this is some sort of advertisement for fascism? Maybe these actual Nazi propaganda posters will help add context:

It can’t be denied that the above image was created to match the style of these posters. That being the case, we can have no trouble assuming that its purpose is also the same. The motte of its argument is that fascism and white supremacy are, at their core, about familial love and the defense of one’s family.

That’s all a propaganda poster is, really. It’s all motte and no bailey. The bailey will introduce concepts about how the love and defense of one’s family scales up to the love and defense of one’s race and the time will come when that will require some sort of active extermination, but don’t talk about that now. When that stuff generates too much heat, just retreat to the motte of happy, blissful, safe families.

When Evan, armed with contextual literacy, rightly identifies this as a fascist propaganda poster, the fascists behind it force him to attack the motte. When anti-fascists in his replies come in expressing confusion and anger about him slinging accusations of fascism at an innocuous concept, that’s when the actual fascists arrive and start softening the normies up to the bailey concepts. Why yes, they say, actually this is fascism. And what’s wrong with fascism? Have you heard bad things? Sounds like you’re the one who has been propagandized, friend. Come join us. We’ll ease you into it.

Don’t be tricked by a motte. If the castle of someone’s ideology looks smaller and better fortified than you’d expected, it’s often because they spend most of their time outside in the bailey (there’s more room to goose-step).