Motte and Baloney: How the Far Right Smuggle Extreme Ideas Into the Mainstream

If you think there's something strange about the discourse you're probably right

This weekend, the vast majority of you who haven’t completely fallen out of love with the cinema will be rocking up to see either Oppenheimer or Barbie, or gearing up for the Barbenheimer double feature. God knows we need a little novelty in our lives.

But there’s third blockbuster you might choose to see instead, if you’re a very specific kind of person. The Jim Caviezel action thriller Sound of Freedom, about a former DHS agent shutting down a child sex trafficking ring. The reviews certainly look promising.

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In fact, the hype around this one is a little bizarre. There’s nothing too unusual about people getting really worked up about a hotly anticipated 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 take it really, really personally when you diss this movie. You’ll receive torrents of accusations, as Klee did, that you are a pedophile who has just unwittingly outed yourself. Which is, again, bizarre. Disliking a movie doesn’t usually result in accusations that you sympathise with the movie’s villains. I didn’t like The Rise of Skywalker, but nobody’s ever sneered and called me Palpatine. Maybe that’s because literally nobody liked The Rise of Skywalker.

You get to wondering if there’s something else driving the urgency for this movie to be seen as a critically untouchable masterpiece to the extent that somebody is buying every unsold ticket to give the statistical impression that it’s a huge hit. And if anyone finds out…

Almost like there’s something nefarious going on with this movie. But there’s the catch—if you try to find out what’s so strange about Sound of Freedom then its defenders will 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.

There’s a calculated reason for all of this and it actually has nothing to do with Sound of Freedom, the film. Nobody cares about this movie in the way that they care about the latest Christopher Nolan epic. You won’t find anyone praising the cinematography or the dialogue.

But to let you know what’s really going 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.

What does all this have to do with a movie about hunting pedophiles?

Well, think of it this way. 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 is 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.

It’s the type of game that is difficult to win because even “not playing” is a playing strategy. But sometimes it is the best strategy that we have. If you’re looking for something to watch this weekend, ignore the manufactured box office curiosity, go ahead and just do the damn Barbenheimer thing.

And try to avoid the Hiroshima discourse

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