Distrust, then verify

Cancelations are built on people's trust in what they read and hear in the media. When someone realizes they were misled once, might they be open to other counter-narratives?

One of my oldest friends (that is, we’ve known each other a very long time—we’re the same age) recently visited me in Houston, Texas. She was knocked a bit off-balance by what she saw and experienced here. Now that she’s back home, I hope she’s rattled to the core, so much so that she shares her impressions with others out of a sense of wonder and worry, and then follows those impressions to their next few logical steps.

This is about cancelation. Really.

Here’s a bit of what defied her expectations: manicured public gardens (one Japanese-inspired, one British-style: the latter with a vegetable section supporting local food banks), a neighborhood cluster of be-rainbowed gay bars, the casual diversity of the most ethnically, linguistically and (I would argue) culinarily diverse city in America, a farm-to-table co-op, the network of running / biking trails along the bayous.

It’s one thing to hear one person you know talk about these things. But he’s just the one person and, well, he’s been in Texas for a long time and maybe he went a bit, well, he’s always been a bit… but now, you know… I don’t think he voted for you know who, but maybe he did…? Even if he didn’t, look at everything else you hear and read and see about Texas.

“What’s going on in Texas and Florida is just so scary. Those two really seem like the worst,” she said, and then caught herself as she took in the incongruous scene around her. We were on the patio of a packed hookah cafe. If we weren’t the only people of pallor there, we were by far the most pallid. As English speakers, we were probably in the minority, and certainly so with our midwestern / mid-Atlantic accents.

“This is Houston,” my partner said.

“This is Texas,” I underlined.

Maybe if my friend had stayed more than a weekend she’d have witnessed some ICE raids, tiki torch marches, heavy-set white-haired men shooting revolvers into the air to celebrate a new oil well, women with downcast eyes in floor-length smocks tending crops, Elon personally bulldozing an historically black neighborhood to build a data center, or a guy blocking the sidewalk, wearing tactical sunglasses and head-to-toe Grunt Style clothing, demanding of dog walkers “What kind of American are you?”

By the same token, had I spent more than a weekend with her in Chicago last year perhaps I’d have seen (or been a victim of) violent crime on public transportation, looting of neighborhood shops and restaurants, police officers being mobbed and assaulted, young children being instructed in proper dildo usage at a public library, or any of the other things that the other half of the internet reliably informs me are near-daily occurrences in lib hellscapes like Chicago or Minnesota.

The mismatch between what the media tells us about a place and a culture mirrors the mismatch between the articles that cancel people and what I hear when I talk to their former athletes and co-workers.

When they read those articles, they wonder if it’s about the same person.

The allegations and insinuations are completely divorced from the person and environment they know.

As a former athlete of a canceled coach told me for an early article:

Is there a very good chance it’s not exactly as written? Absolutely. There’s some truth, and we’ll figure that out and reconcile it at some point. But it can’t be 100% correct, because I know this person. I’ve never seen anything like that in all the time that I have known him.

They often have to put themselves into a particular frame of mind just to see how someone could make the leap from an actual occurrence to the way the media or a tribunal presents it as something toxic or even criminal. After doing so, they frequently recoil at having engaged in that mindset, even if just for a moment, as they realize how poisonous, destructive, and a bit deranged it is.

Now imagine being someone who lives their life in such a state, and you start to understand the pathologies that underlie cancelations.

Similarly, the expectations that my friend brought with her are similar to what canceled people fear from every person they meet.

“I instantly think these people are googling me, and they’re going into this call thinking I’m the racist and sexist. That’s what’s happening. That’s what my life is. That’s the reality of it. That’s what I face with everything.”

When the media authoritatively tells you that a person, a people, or a place are the worst, you set your expectations and gird yourself appropriately. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is not an option because nothing you’ve seen, read, or heard admits even a sliver of doubt about the judgment.

Another former athlete of that canceled coach remembers her interactions with the writer of the most damaging article:

When people gave him positive feedback about the program, he ignored it. I don’t understand exactly how journalism works, but I know he was seeking a certain type of story, and he was going to ignore parts that didn’t fit his narrative.

My friend witnessed and experienced nothing that the media she consumes told her are regular features of life in Houston. Conversely, she was surprised at much of what she did see and do because at no point—particularly in the last two years—did anyone more reliable or credible than me tell her that those are parts of everyday life and long-established culture in Houston and Texas.

This is an important distinction from two people I talked about in a recent article:

[They both said to me,] “I’m sure these people you’re talking to are nice people. I’m sure it really sucked for the person that goes through it. I get that you have a lot in common with them. But...”

But it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t done something.

But these things don’t just go down for no reason.

But you don’t get to that sort of position without doing, or at least tolerating, or at least benefiting from some pretty awful things.

Those two have not yet had their “zero to one” moment. They have not spoken with a canceled person, nor someone who could provide counter-evidence against the cancelation. And, thankfully, they have not been canceled themselves.

In the absence of any direct experience or evidence, they rely fully on the legitimacy they ascribe to the media and the mob.

Trust no one?*

The trick now is whether my friend’s two days of direct experience will be enough to create some doubt the next time her trusted media tells her what people or life are like in some foreign land, like a southern “red” state.

She doesn’t need to think that she was lied to or even misled: simply that they were demonstrably wrong that one time about that one thing, so maybe they’re wrong this next time about this other thing. Or maybe they were wrong before about that other thing. Like that author who they said is a transphobe, the coaches who they all said were assaulters or groomers, the CEO who was a racist and a sexist, the American student in Italy they said was a violent sex murderess…

We can’t go to all the places we hear about to verify if what we’ve heard is true. Nor can we all do background research on canceled people to determine if they really are the worst people ever.

We have to be able to trust some of what we read or hear. Unfortunately, our current environments for media and knowledge sharing are neither wide nor open.

Each side accuses the other of having a destructively narrow viewpoint, while doing everything possible to ensure that their side stays within just such a narrow range of knowledge and thought. Part of their extreme perniciousness is how they pretend toward diversity within their walls: “I get a variety of perspectives. Every day I read both [the Washington Post and the New York Times] / [Fox News and the Daily Wire].”

The advantage we have in this ontological Battle of the Narrows is how brittle those structures are. It doesn’t take much to first fracture and then blow them wide open.

These little crevices of distrust, however we can create them or help people find them, are two-way corridors. They give people a way out of their bubble (or cell, or cave) in search of new information; and they give new sources of information a way in.

Forward-facing and fighting for the future

Cancelations often lead to narrative foreclosure because they overwrite decades of someone’s life story.

We can date the trauma to the first instance of media humiliation and misrepresentation, but the identity annihilation can go back decades: “She was always a toxic racist bullying groomer. We’re just hearing about it now because silent no more something something.” From there, the forward-facing trauma takes over. The humiliation, identity annihilation, banishment, perhaps betrayal renew every day those articles, headlines, and posts are out there where somebody can see them.

It’s literally Orwellian: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Counter-narratives are so important because they, too, are forward-facing. Correcting the record is only a small part of what they do. Their greater value is returning control over their identity to the canceled person. That allows them to start their future from where they are, post-cancelation, rather than engaging in an unwinnable battle for the past and how things “should have been.” The counter-narrative is the counterstrike in the daily, forward-facing battle for the future.

I don’t expect everyone to believe everything I write about cancelations and canceled people, or life in Houston. As long as they recognize that everything they’ve read everywhere else might not be accurate, that’s all the chance the counter-narrative and I need. More importantly, that’s the chance canceled people are living for.

* I would have named that section or maybe the article “Trust Me,” but that title has been put to much better use: