Washington State Has Too Many Confederates

Let's sum up the blog so far: For a state that wasn’t even a state during the Civil War, Washington has an unfortunate number of Confederates. Back in 2017, every shell-shocked Democrat had their own theory to explain President Trump’s election. I came up with mine after a third-grade concert. A Chevy parked outside the …

From Cambridge Analytica to Johnny Reb in Four Steps

How to go from data mining Facebook to stirring up Confederate sympathizers in four steps.

“Tribalism” in political commentary means “social identity”

Recently heard an interesting interview on local radio with author Amy Chua about tribalism in modern politics. While it’s great to hear the discussion of our identities as a driving force between our choices in politics, it’s a little frustrating that the word “tribalism” is being used ubiquitously to refer to social identity. To be …

California Secede? Never(ish).

Perhaps we should’ve mentioned that while we didn’t see a single confederate flag in California, we did spot approximately 10,000 Bear Flags. And they wave as something like a flag of the Trump “resistance.” California, today the world’s sixth largest economy, has been raising eyebrows for seeming to live up to the "Republic" title on …

Confederate flags in LA: 0

Neither near the beaches nor up in the hills did we see a single Confederate flag during a recent visit to the larger Los Angeles area. In a place where travel is measured more in time than in miles, we spent interminable hours on I-5, the 605, the 405, the 101 and their many siblings. …

Russians indicted for plying Confederate crusades

Thirteen Russians were indicted this week as part of the special investigation into Kremlin efforts to sway the last presidential election. The legal details of the FBI's Russian investigation are fascinating, but consistently bury how these cyber operatives won American hearts and minds. As most people know, Russian fronts created innumerable fake social media accounts, …

Sex, identity and an Alabama Senate race

There’s a notable experiment in social identity theory in which people were asked to sign up for a program that offered a small amount of cash if their favorite team lost. There was virtually no downside. You signed the paper. If your team won, great. If your team lost, you got paid. But people wouldn’t …

WaPost: How the Russians pretended to be Texans — and Texans believed them

The Heart of Texas was the most popular pro-secession page on Facebook. It turned out to be run by Russians, who only needed a cartoonish understanding of Confederate feelings to rack up millions of views. As Casey Michel writes in the Washington Post: "Its organizers had a strangely one-dimensional idea of its subject. They seemed …