A Sociological Eye

 What You’ve Heard Before This has been a very difficult week for those who voted for Kamala Harris. Harris lost the Electoral College by a lot (226-301), and over on the right, they’re calling it a landslide. It’s probably true that she lost the popular vote as well—but by a much, much smaller margin than the electoral vote gap, and one that continues to shrink as votes continue to be counted. (Thirteen states are still counting their votes as I write, the weekend after the election, and that includes the massive state of California.) The reaction of those who voted Republican has been predictable. If you looked at the rightwing news or social media, you saw a lot of exulting about the joy of “drinking delicious liberal tears.” Scenes of Democrats looking shocked or depressed and hugging one another were looped with gloating and laughs. That’s how things go today: when MAGA voters win, they taunt their opponents, and when they lose, they rant that the process was rigged and th...

  Every time there is a mass shooting, or the shooting of a public figure, people become glued to their information sources for news of who did it and why. That's a pretty universal reaction, because we want to know what the story is. We want there to *be* a story. We want to be able to fit this incident into our understandings of the world.   In the contemporary US, where people can hold totally different worldviews and beliefs, and even occupy "bespoke realities" happily served up by content providers, there is a frantic effort to control the narrative that emerges. At the moment I am writing this, factual information about Thomas Crooks, who shot at Trump and instead killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others, is scant. This frustrates the millions who want to hear a complete story, most importantly the why of it. What was the shooter's motive?   The fact that shots were fired at Trump in a period of intense campaigning primes everyone for a certain expl...

This is the story of David DePape : gamer, nudist, and rightwing conspiracy theorist. In the early morning of October 28, 2022, Depape broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House. She was in Washington, DC, with her security detail. But her husband Paul Pelosi was home. DePape beat him with a hammer, fracturing his skull and injuring his arm and hands. Within minutes of this news being announced, hot takes were being posted on Twitter. I looked, and here is what I saw: on the political right, the claim was that DePape was a crazed leftist. The “proof”? Well, come on, he lived in San Francisco! He had long hair! Googling the man turned up a history of participating in nudist protests. That couldn’t be a conservative! Oh, look, he listed his occupation in a newspaper article from a decade ago as a hemp jewelry artist. What could be a more ridiculous, emasculated lib-type job for a man? So, hmm, if he’s a leftist, why did he break into the Pelosi home and attack Paul, ...