Previous: News on News 4
When we were a little girl, growing up in a small Massachusetts town, we lived in awe of the paper: of the Boston Globe.
We saw it as an object of mystical authority— a deeply comforting authority which one day, we hoped, we should grow so wise as to understand. We loved the smell of its ink, the ragged fringe of its edges, the easy smoothness of our scissors cutting thru its pages, cutting out articles to press into our journal like buttercups— buttercups filled w/ gravitas, & w/ mysterious tidings from the big, big world.
It was, therefore, w/ a heavy heart that we spun our random number generator & landed on this buttercup (TB) from the Globe:
“Inside the Zizians, a radical California-based vegan cult now linked to 6 violent deaths” 🙃
Not even “cult-like”, o Globe? Out comes our bingo card, it’s ringing off the hook— oh, we almost forgot to mention: we've added a new row!
TB took 3 separate ppl to uproot: Hanna Krueger, an 😮 Amherst College grad— we are ourselves a Five Colleges alumna 🎓, but could never have dreamed of getting into Amherst 🫣 …Laura Crimaldi, a grad from our very own college?— who’s won (/shared) a Pulitzer?? & hardboiled crime reporter Sean Cotter 😮💨
They’ve given us 3 bingo points w/ that headline already, but you know, headlines are prob. an editorial decision— we are impressed & not a little cowed by the HLS trio. We are ready to read w/ a beginner’s mind. Who knows what treasures of nuance &— dare we hope— juicy, original New News reporting— await us?
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We zip thru the first few paragraphs— misgendering Jamie, misgendering Milo— op, and screeech to a halt at the trio’s first big hurrah:
It is a bizarre tale of extremism, delusion, and violence with details that feel hatched by a far-right meme factory, with lead characters that espouse rational thinking but leave a senseless path of violence in their wake. A circle of whiz kids turned bad.
You know, back when we were young & fresh— about two months ago— we spent no small amount of time lamenting w/ our gf that this case does indeed, from certain angles, appear “hatched by a far-right meme factory”.
Our gf, for abt two weeks, was convinced that Ziz was a gov’t spook, designed to further turn this nation against trans ppl. There was a period of time when this idea haunted her so grievously that we stopped discussing the case altogether— which took, as you can imagine, tremendous willpower on our part.
Looking back on how well-suited Ziz’s story seems for our age… we dk if this signals “meme factory”— or spookery!— so much as it may signal a range of perceptual biases:
• Confirmation bias: Ziz’s saga is a rare but highly legible example of what many in America already believe abt leftists, abt trans ppl, abt trans leftists— & abt what wickedness they are capable of.
• Negativity bias: Nonviolent stories abt trans ppl— & yes, even abt the left!— are ofc far more common, yet the (alleged) violence in this story makes it stick in our minds.
• Attribution bias: The trans identities & left-wing beliefs of Ziz & friends are consistently foregrounded, & explicitly/implicitly framed as relevant to their (alleged) actions. In murder investigations of liberal, centrist, or even conservative cis ppl, gender would be seen as incidental, & political beliefs wd likely come up only in a “mind of the killer” deep dive.
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All this to say: we’re living thru a time of extraordinary moral panic.
Ziz’s story has been framed to reflect what the public are already primed to see as a threat. By whom have they been primed? By whom is this story framed? Well, by politicians for that first q.— but aided & abetted by the media; &, ofc, the a. to that 2nd q. is the media.
Here the Globe has pulled a sneaky illusion on us: it has displaced the media’s framing onto the story itself: as though the facts are to blame for their unfortunate resonance— as tho the media’s foregrounding of certain facts, w/in a bigger pattern of hostile media narratives, are not what makes the violent trans leftists angle of this story really pop.
This is like blaming a house for casting eerie shadows, when, in fact, there is a clever lighting designer angling a floodlight up from down below.
The Globe could have said: “This story could easily be distorted or weaponized by the far right”.
It could have continued: “We will now, for yr viewing pleasure, de-weaponize the story, & present it as free from distortions as possible!”
But it did not. Instead it obscured its own role in narrative construction (NC), & distanced itself from the ideological implications of this NC, while still profiting from its heat!
“We’re just telling the story,” these journalists can say. “It’s not our fault it looks like a right-wing meme.” But ofc, it is they who have chosen the framing, the headline, the arc. It is they who have cast the shadows.
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Alas, we did not add “illusions” to our bingo card: we were naïve, & assumed that J. Oliver Conroy’s would be a standout performance! If we had to give a name to the stagecraft shown here, we might call it “The Vaporous Ventriloquist” (TVV) — or “Light & Shadow” (LAS).
TVV is a classic act: the journalists step offstage, & let their sensational clippings— we mean, facts— do the talking. We hear a voice echo— radical, delusional, trans, vegan, cult— & believe it emerged organically from the story itself.
LAS is even more remarkable for its subtlety. There are no jump scares here— just carefully rigged illumination, casting every silhouette in unsettling relief. “We’re just reporting what’s there,” say the journalists, as if the shadows weren’t placed w/ perfect theatrical intent. It is a trick of perception that demands no lies— just careful framing, & an audience primed to fear what flickers in the dark.
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Be that as it may…
Next the Rationalists are sketched in broad outlines as “a niche Bay Area philosophical circle”, which 😇 “aims to rid individual minds of illogical thought in a bid to save the world”. Their indefatigable harassment & witch-hunting of the girls is, in the trio’s hands, rendered as a prescient warning cry against a “volatil[e]… splinter group (SG)”. No doubt these girls were a much-needed thorn in the Rationalists’ side, but we dk if they splintered off so much as were thrust into exile.... Who “leads” this SG? To whom do they “adhere”? Ofc they themselves would say: nobody & to no one— they’re anarchists! But the trio begs to differ: at their head is none other than a “charismatic thought leader, who calls herself Ziz” 😊 Well, “charismatic” is quite nice of the trio to say— yet this they follow up w/, we kid you not, “MESMERIC”!
🤣🤣🤣 We never expected to see this word in the wild. Yes, indeed, that mesmeric Zizster is sternly reprimanded for “warp[ing]” the “tenets” of the Rationalists into “something… sinister”: never mind how sinister they were to begin with!
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Next the trio cite a post which we ourselves have cited— a post to which we will be forever grateful, bc this post introduced us to the blog of Gwen— & thereby broke the spell which the media’s Zcoverage (Ziz coverage) had placed upon us.
Will the trio read “A COMMUNITY WARNING" (ACW) & be similarly disillusioned? No! They will read it &— we kid you not— call it “prescient”! Why prescient? Bc, as ACW’s anonymous author (AA) writes, “Some people in the Rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence from Ziz and some of her associates”.
AA is ofc, we now know, echoing the warped & sinister tenets of Anna Salamon: who, despite her busy, busy CFAR life, somehow found the time, after the girls’ protest, to post relentlessly on how certain she was that both she & others were “concerned about… physical violence” from these 4 girls who had never been violent to anyone, had never expressed violent intentions, &— oh yes— all happened to be trans.
Given Anna’s clout & authority chez the Rationalists, it took little time for such manufactured fears to spread far & wide. We have to hand it to AA: their statement is not wrong, simply… lacking all context.
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The trio continues to weirdly use all of our fav words: next they reference the “fearsome reputation of Ziz and her disciples, the Zizians”, & zoom in on one of these “disciples”: onto poor Jamie, whose heartrending backstory they subcontract to AA, who waggles his fingers & hints darkly that Jamie harbored “very strong hatred (VSH)” of their cartoonishly villainous parents. Imagine that!
We, btw, have seen no signs of VSH on Jamie’s blog. We have instead seen a person calmly & sadly relating their past, interspersed w/ quotes from “CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving”, & “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”.
Next came a small phrase from the trio which sparked some joy: the killings, they say, have “expos[ed] this fringe ideology to wider notoriety (WN)”. We love it when “Zizian” descriptions map so beautifully onto the Rationalists, & we do indeed hope this grim affair brings them much, much WN!
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