What happens when you combine an authoritarian regime with a misogynistic media environment? A generation of lonely young men who blame women for their problems.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Founding Director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL), joins Jen to discuss why this combination is so detrimental to society, why despots benefit from an incessant flood of lies, and how there is a dire need to teach people media literacy.
Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a sociologist and professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education, and is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL).
Transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. We are delighted to have back Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who, of course, is the head of PERIL, and the author of a new book, that looks at men, women, and misogyny. Welcome, Cynthia.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Thanks for having me back, Jen. Always good to be here.
Jen Rubin
It is wonderful to talk. The theme that has been running through my mind of late, has to do with empathy. We see so many instances, most recently in Chicago, of, frankly, men behaving badly. And we see other men who, don’t care to intervene, or who seem to take some gratification from that. What does your research tell you about where that comes from, and how perhaps we might even reverse it and, develop some skills that would benefit society as a whole, not to mention these men themselves?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in relation to exactly this question of lack of empathy, but also willingness to look away, or, or even support, or, you know, engage in authoritarian violent actions, is that there is this sort of playbook of authoritarian communication tactics that I see happening in four stages. So I’ve been thinking and writing a little bit about this over the last couple of weeks, that you have… the very first thing authoritarians tend to do is try to confuse the public, and they do that by undermining legitimate sources of knowledge, right? Journalism, the media, mainstream media, but also expertise, universities. So we’ve seen that.
Attacks on the media, attacks on universities, attacks on expertise, undermining the presentation of alternative facts. Right? All kinds of things. For years. And then once people are confused, as Hannah Arendt said, about what’s true and false, it’s very easy for them to also lose sight of what’s right and wrong. They don’t understand the difference anymore, or it’s easier to miss the difference between right and wrong, so your kind of moral lines also get blurry. So after that state, you know, state exists, then you… peddle fear. You fearmonger, right? You create a bunch of fear using false crime statistics, using whatever kind of fear-mongering tactics you need to do, and then the next thing you do is blame, right? So you confuse, you create fear, you terrify, and then you blame or scapegoat.
And so we see that in the case of Chicago, and everything going on with ICE is really the immigrants are the scapegoat, but we’ve seen it with feminists being the scapegoat, or Jews being the scapegoat, racial and ethnic minorities being the scapegoat, Democrats being the scapegoat, media, journalists, whatever it is. someone is to blame for the state you’re in. I’ve just terrified you with, telling you your safety’s going to be taken away from you, your family’s safety, your well-being, your welfare, your jobs.
We just heard—I think it was J.D. Vance talking about housing—the reason why there’s a housing crisis is because there’s, you know, something absurd, false, like 30 million immigrants taking the housing away from hard-working Americans, right? So it’s… If something’s gonna be taken away from you, there’s someone to blame for it, you no longer know the source of information, and then finally. the grand finale is you sell solutions, right?
And so by the time they get to the selling solution stage, the restoration, the… we’re going to bring you back to some better time when men are on top and, you know, in control of everything, and traditional values reign true, and all these scapegoats are out of your life, and you can return to this safe feeling that you want. And we’ll tell you what’s right and wrong, and we’ll tell you what’s true and false, right? And so, that’s what we’ve been seeing happen, and I think that’s how you get to a state where people are no longer distinguishing well between fact and fiction. They’re no longer distinguishing well between right and wrong. They also get overwhelmed and oversaturated with the information, and so there’s this kind of compassion fatigue that happens around, like, there’s so many things to be upset about all at once, and that’s also part of the tactic. So I think it’s very strategic and not coincidental that we end up where we are with a lack of empathy or action or even willingness to engage in it.
Jen Rubin
One of the difficulties is once people become emotionally engaged in a viewpoint, as you’ve just pointed out. Bringing additional facts or trying to argue them out of it becomes exceptionally difficult. How do you intervene in this cycle of propaganda and empathy-depriving, behavior and manipulation?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, the one thing that doesn’t work, as you just pointed out, is to counter-argue, right? You really can’t with somebody who’s already going down a rabbit hole of disinformation, or propaganda, or conspiracy theories, or somebody who is already committed to a worldview. And if you want to persuade them otherwise, you cannot do it with counter-arguments, because they will double down a lot of the time, and just dig in their heels more, and get defensive, and feel like you’re trying to change me, or control me, or you’re part of the narrative of the conspiracists, the globalists, trying to manipulate, etc.
The one thing that we’ve found in our research that does work really well is teach people how to think more skeptically about the media they consume. Point out the manipulative tactics very specifically, showing how a particular tactic works, how tactics that are manipulative tactics, like, do your own research, and then… but then we’re going to tell you what to think anyway, but we’ve now told you to do your own research, and so that DYOR, we call it, kind of actually nudges you to believe what I’m saying a little more. So, can you point out manipulative tactics? As we say, we don’t tell people what to think, we teach them how to think. And then, say, make up your own minds. And that actually gets people to reject things like anti-Semitic propaganda faster and more efficiently and sort of more sweepingly than trying to tell them why it’s wrong morally, or why it’s incorrect factually, because that just can lead them to dig in their heels more.
Jen Rubin: Absolutely. Now, sometimes the manipulation is extremely deliberate. We have seen the administration, for example, use very old film to portray Chicago, or to portray Portland as a flame, and in fact, these are months or even years old. When you are trying to… point out the manipulation. As you say, how do you deal with someone who no longer knows what’s real and what’s not? You say, but look. Chicago is peaceful, and they say, well, how do we know that’s real?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, well, that gets… exactly, that gets back to this first point of confusion, the deliberate undermining first. And before you can introduce, kind of, propaganda, you have to make people wobbly around their sense of legitimate facts and expertise. So, if there is one thing that will help with that, is, you know, one, in an individual level, you can help people understand how to fact check. Right? Let’s go look at Snopes, let’s go look at a site that will tell you whether this is true or not, that are unbiased media fact-checking sites, let’s say. So you can help people understand that. You can help them understand alternative media coverage that shows other things, and then let them make up their mind, you know, to say, like, let’s look at this footage. This footage is shown to be taken from 8 years ago during a fire, or this was shown to be… this happened during COVID, when footage of the National Guard rolling in during a parade was used, you know, into a city to show some falsely that, you know, by social media accounts, showing that the National Guard was rolling in to seize control of cities and make people take vaccines, or something false, right? So that’s one thing. But the thing for all of us in you know, in positions to communicate with the public about, I think, is also to work on the restoration of confidence In expertise, in the media, in, in universities, in science. in understanding how do you assess… why is the scientific process so important? Why does the peer-reviewed process tell you that we know something has been vetted as accurate? You know, how do we know that something has been… data has been collected, that someone stands on their expertise, not just in a descriptive way, but in a way that really is reporting, and sharing that… the best scientific knowledge we have. And I think we in the university sector have to do a better job at reminding the public what knowledge is and what happens when you don’t have it.
And I think, you know, the media, too, is struggling, obviously, in lots of different ways, but I think the more we can do to remind the public where you can find unbiased sources of information, where you can find opinion pieces, where you can find scientific pieces, right, and how you can parse those things out. there used to be, when I was growing up, only 3 news channels, right? And so we all watched one of the three big news channels at night. It’s much harder now, with people getting so much other news from social media, so often not reading past the headline, and so I think the more we can do to help the public parse that out and disentangle the information landscape, the better.
Jen Rubin: There are those moments where you really do see behind the curtain. Judy Vance recently was arguing that, well, we have to sometimes argue against science, as if Science is this monolith, and one can argue from the outside, as if one could argue against gravity, without appreciating that scientific discovery and question and testing is done within the scientific community. That seems to be… One of these teachable moments where you can go to young people or to adults and kind of explain what the scientific process is like.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, that’s right, and why academic freedom is essential to it, right? It is a part of the First Amendment, right? It falls under freedom of speech, but it’s more specific than that in the sense that it is the freedom to be… to produce knowledge without pressure, without bias, without political engagement, but also without, you know, without feeling like you have to silence bits of it, either internally or externally, right? For the political context, but also for the context within any given university in order to be promoted, right?
And so that’s why tenure exists. And tenure has been shrinking even way before this, this administration. So, you know, this idea that you have fewer and fewer people who feel safe to, to pursue a research agenda independent of political pressure is so much greater. You know, right now, it’s, incredibly high, right, because of all the pressures on universities with DEI and equity language that is supposed suddenly the boogeyman. And so, I think that it’s really important for the university sector, including foundations—and also public officials and leaders and governors to sort of remind people what we lose when we lose sources of knowledge That, you know, including in the media. I mean, I mean, academic and journalistic sources of knowledge are essential to understanding the world that we live in, and authoritarian governments rely on the lack of that, and rely on… I mean, Orban, when Orban came in in Hungary, the first thing he did in the higher ed sector was shut down gender and women’s studies departments. And, you know, really understood that university knowledge poses a threat to… and in that particular case, women’s rights pose a threat, because you know, democracies crumble when, when women and LGBTQ folks lose the right to vote, or are less empowered, or have fewer participation rights. You know, an inclusive democracy requires uplifting everyone and enabling them all to vote, and so shutting down those sources of knowledge are really a part of that story.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. One of the things we’ve also seen of late, whether it’s blowing up boats and the name of fighting drug smugglers, or it’s the really unrestrained violence in Chicago, is this adulation, this, kind of feverish, reverence for violence, for unrestrained, lawless violence. we get concerned because simply by showing it, you’re afraid that that simply reinforces it. What is the way to make sure that these violent images do not become, in essence, an ideal, a aspiration for, particularly for young men who see masculinity and see self-assertion as something that they want to follow.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, well, I think there’s sort of 3 or 4 things that have to happen at the same time. One is we have to, problematize and question and create open spaces for boys and young men to have these conversations about the pressures they feel. As they grow from boys into men, in a culture that has you know, meant that dominance and aggression are hallmarks of masculinity, and that, boys report in interviews and research and conversations with me that they have, you know, they feel very much that they go through adolescence carving off bits of themselves to keep themselves safe, also from the violence of other boys and men, the bullying and the enforcement of the gender policing to be a certain kind of way, to not be vulnerable, to not ask for help, to not cry.
It’s what Mark Green and Ted Bunch have called the Man Box culture, right, in their work on transforming different kinds of manhood and healthier types of masculinities in a broader range. We have to find ways, and I think when we look at the outcomes for men, the loneliness crisis, the fact that 25% of men under the age of 30 now say they don’t have a single friend, that 50% of American men say their online lives are more rewarding than their offline lives, you know, we have terrible outcomes, including shorter lifespans, in part due to that isolation and unwillingness to go to a doctor or ask for help for men. And so, these are three-quarters of the deaths of despair, suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-fueled deaths. So, it’s not like it’s worked out all that well for men to have that kind of culture imposed on them, and I think the more we can problematize that, the better.
On the reporting side, in the meantime, you know, there’s always this question of, do you… is sunlight the best disinfectant, or are you just giving more oxygen to something that, you know, wouldn’t grow as much? And I think that that’s a balance. I mean. you know, one of the things I do whenever I talk about a mass shooting, for example, I never name the shooter, I just name the city, and so I think there are practices that we can take, you know, the place that it happened, the Charleston church, or the, you know, El Paso Walmart, right? You know, there’s no reason to give the infamy that some of these mass violent actors want to them, to help them live on.
And so I think we can report carefully, report carefully. Carefully with images, not glorify the violence. Problematize it, and at the same time, on an everyday level, parents, coaches, mental health counselors, teachers, to really try to pay attention to how much we reinforce that narrative that says boys and men have to be ready to be violent at any time in order to be a man, right? I think that narrative is very clear in our research, that boys and men still feel that way. And, that that pressure, especially as the provider role that they often feel pressured to, becomes harder to achieve with this economy. That protector role and the violence that comes with it often assumes a bigger psychological role. And so keeping, you know, a light on that at the everyday level, however we can, is essential.
Jen Rubin
Now, one of the kind of meta-themes of, the times that we, live in is alienation, and is separation, and is scapegoating. It’s fascinating to see, again, I go back to Chicago, because we’ve been so heavily involved in covering it and watching it, that there was the opposite reaction. You see a lot of community support and self-aid and the binding of ties. That seems to me to be, one of the best responses, whether it’s men, women, which is that there is a sense of community, because my… My gut instinct is that we run into a lot of trouble when people are in the room on the computer all day long by themselves.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Absolutely, and it’s also a frame of mind, right? It’s a lens through which you see the world, and Fred Rogers said it most famously after 9-11, when somebody said, you know, how do we talk to kids about this? What do we tell children? And he said, you tell them to look for the helpers. You know, you don’t look at the planes crashing into the building, or the people jumping out of it, you look at the people running in, and the narrative that you build is that… is how people help. And… and you also… the other part of that is not just telling kids or people to look at the helpers, right? Which is a lens toward hope and optimism, but you also give them a sense of efficacy and agency by encouraging them to help themselves… also help, like, be helpers, that you can help.
And I think a lot of people feel so paralyzed by… you know, waiting, like, waiting for some big solution to come, but actually, these, you know, mutual aid, or providing help when SNAP benefits run out to a local family, or, engaging at a local level in some way, to show support, petition, hold up signs, to write letters, to, you know, whatever anyone can do to have a sense of agency. efficacy and engagement. That does build community cohesion, which also builds trust across dividing lines sometimes, especially if you can deal with something like hunger, hunger of children, right? You can really pull people together, not always, but in some cases, across partisan lines.
And so, I think there are ways that people can take action, you know, and a lens through which they can have more hope. As research has really shown, every time there are terrible things that happen, terrorist attacks, but also authoritarian violence.
Jen Rubin
And that is, of course, the way you build democracy, which we are very big on here, and that is why we, try to engage our community. Thank you, Cynthia, for all the research you do, all the work you do. It gives us great insight and really brings it down to a human level. So, congratulations on your book, Man Up. Thank you. And we will look forward to having you back soon.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Great, thanks for having me.
