The Vincible Ignorance Movement: How the radical right sees outreach efforts;

INTRODUCTION

Vincible ignorance: 1) ignorance a person could eliminate by applying reasonable diligence under the circumstances; 2) ignorance a reasonable person ought not to have; 3) moral culpability for willful ignorance of matters that one is obligated to know, e.g., as in an elected politician or religious leader being morally obligated to determine and tell the truth when reasonably possible

Blog note!: Going forward, I will sometimes characterize or refer to the “Vincible Ignorance Movement” (VIM) to describe radical right demagoguery about issues of woke, wokeness and the like the. The core concept is “vincible ignorance” (VI). The radical right wants Americans to be ignorant of inconvenient truths, including historical truths. Those labels applied to the radical right elites and their operatives are accurate and appropriate. 

VIM ideologues, elites and propagandists rely heavily on both ignorance and affirmative lies, deceit, slanders and emotional manipulation. The VI label is an intentional attempt to point out the fact that either the radical right elites are liars or they advocate things that are false.

From what I can tell, the VIM and Christian nationalism are tightly linked. Much of what VIM elites and operatives are doing looks like core Christian nationalist dogma. As with CN dogma, the VIM is focused on accumulating power and wealth for elites, usually at the expense of the public interest, civil liberties, pluralism, tolerance and the like. One can think of the VIM as a key part or manifestation of the CN movement. It's not clear to me how the brass knuckles capitalist movement in the Republican Party fits in, but it is probably at least sympathetic because most hard core capitalist ideologues are not supporters of civil liberties. And, many hard core capitalist ideologues are hard core Christian nationalists themselves. 

A NEWS BIT

Radical right oozes arrogant contempt for diversity and outreach: The WaPo reports about how the radical right sees pluralism in universities and what it is starting to do about it:

After Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) named him last summer to the University of Virginia’s governing board, Bert Ellis had a platform to influence the school’s administration. He spotted a potential target, a vice provost named Louis P. Nelson, tasked with community engagement, public service and academic outreach programs.

Nelson, who reports to U-Va’s chief academic officer, Provost Ian Baucom, is also a professor of architectural history and an award-winning scholar and teacher. He has researched buildings and landscapes that shaped slavery in West Africa and the Americas, including at the prestigious public university that Thomas Jefferson founded in Charlottesville.

Ellis was unimpressed.

“Check out this numnut who works for Baucom and has nothing to do but highlight slavery at UVA,” Ellis wrote on July 22 in text messages to two other new board members, Stephen P. Long and Amanda Pillion. “This bloated bureaucracy has got to be slashed.”  

“We’re like Patton,” Ellis was quoted as saying. “We go forward. We don’t retreat.” 

In 2021 Ellis criticized how guides were portraying Jefferson to campus visitors. They seemed intent “on ‘contextualizing’ Mr. Jefferson as a slave holder and rapist,” Ellis wrote at the time — a portrayal that he said completely undermined “his part of the Founding of America and our University.”  

“These numnuts at the CD [Cavalier Daily] and Student Council will not stop until the Administration removes everything on the Grounds,” Ellis replied on Sept. 1, referring to the student newspaper by initials. “At some point they will bitch that all the red brick that Mr. Jefferson used is racist and needs to be replaced. I am not sure if ignoring them or confronting them is the right strategy but they are definitely gearing up for a fight.”

Ellis claims that characterizing Jefferson as a slave holder and rapist completely undermines his role in founding America and UVA. Is that true? Or, does at least pointing out that Jefferson was a slave owner present actual historical fact, leaving people free to think what they choose on the basis of disclosed facts, instead of facts cherry picked by elite White people? What about calling Jefferson a rapist? 

Again, the intent of the radical right to rewrite inconvenient history, or prevent it from ever being written or even discussed in public, is clear and undeniable. American history will be Whitewashed if the radical right gets its way. This culture war battle by the Vincible Ignorance Movement (VIM) is underway at a major University. This is not about a public primary, middle or high school. This is far beyond the VIM arguing that evil liberals are grooming 5 and 6 year old children into the sex trade by talking about sexuality. We are dealing with adults here, not children. 

What is going on at UVA arguably mostly reflects (i) immoral vincible ignorance by radical right elites to Whitewash inconvenient history, (ii) even more immoral cynical radical right elites flat out lying (lies of omission via deleting the inconvenient bits of history), or (iii) some combination of both. In my opinion, it is mostly option ii. They know better, but their cynical goal is to instill VI in the American public.

Q1: Is that analysis off the mark, over the top, just wrong or otherwise not credible? We can all be pretty sure that radical right elites firmly rejects all of it. They want us ignorant for our own good.

Q2: Does distorting history like this represent White bigotry, racism, some of both or none of either? 

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The radical right culture war on woke AI: The WaPo writes:

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led campaigns against critical race theory and gender identity in schools, this week pointed his half-million Twitter followers toward a new target for right-wing ire: “woke AI.” 

The tweet highlighted President Biden’s recent order calling for artificial intelligence that “advances equity” and “prohibits algorithmic discrimination,” which Rufo said was tantamount to “a special mandate for woke AI.”

After ChatGPT wrote a poem praising President Biden, but refused to write one praising former president Donald Trump, the creative director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Leigh Wolf, lashed out.

“The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable,” Wolf tweeted on Feb. 1.

His tweet went viral and within hours an online mob harassed three OpenAI employees — two women, one of them Black, and a nonbinary worker — blamed for the AI’s alleged bias against Trump. None of them work directly on ChatGPT, but their faces were shared on right-wing social media.  

OpenAI’s Altman has been emphasizing that Silicon Valley should not be in charge of setting boundaries around AI — echoing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other social media executives who have argued the companies should not have to define what constitutes misinformation or hate speech.

It is fine to try to limit bias and bias-inspired errors in AI. But the what about AI refusing to praise Trump when he is a traitor, chronic liar and a criminal? Those are facts in evidence, not just opinions. The radical right advocates keeping misinformation and hate speech on the same level as honest speech. That is authoritarianism, pure and simple.

Of course the radical right denies essentially all of the proven bad things about Trump. It demands equivalence where there is none to be had. There is no way that AI engineers can avoid political backlash from people who are all in on advocating falsehoods based on vincible ignorance and/or just lying to the public.  

Things sure are getting really ugly, aren’t they.