COVID Conversations: Reopen Florida Woman
Samantha Kutner, Independent Research Consultant, Occasional Proud Boys Whisperer
I’ve experienced more emotions in the span of a few weeks than I’ve allowed myself during all of grad school.
There was never any time.
I’ve been reflecting on ways our country can unify in this time of unpreceded division, bleach cures, and Tiger King.
I’ve recently achieved an enormous milestone in my research and it’s prompting me to reconfigure where I am at with myself and my work.
After three years of applied research, I’m stepping into this new space as an independent research consultant.
The Proud Boys are exploiting stay at home orders in an attempt to regain visibility. We are in the middle of a global pandemic and an election year and there are no lack of incidents to track. In fact, gathering the raw data on a Proud Boys incidents in Florida (in order to update the Proud Boys incident map) was how I came to tonight’s conversation.
Before I continue, let me provide you with a little background in Florida. As of April 29th, there have been 1,218 COVID deaths. Florida has also ordered coroners to stop releasing Coronavirus death data.
There is also this.
It’s not just the absence of public health information that bothers me, but who is filling in the knowledge gap, and for what purpose.
If anything three years of ethnographic field research has taught me, it’s the difference between people who are conscious of their manipulations and people who are prone to be manipulated.
I can mourn for the systematic devaluing of education that got us to where we are at today. I can respond with my wittiest retort bad faith actors willing to lie to their audience base for personal gain.
or
I can attempt to engage with those who are driven by values I do not fully understand but am curious to learn about.
This is more or less how I came to find a Facebook group called Reopen Florida, where I found a woman with an interesting problem. Our conversation ended an hour ago. Here is how it went.
*for her security, I am keeping her identity anonymous.
Florida Woman Original Post: “Alright. I need some help people. I’m in a mom’s group and being called selfish basically because I said I would not wear a mask when I am not sick. The main argument always comes down to “you could be asymptomatic and spreading it.” And that wearing the cloth masks is for other people’s protection so clearly I’m a monster and don’t care about her and other people. What do you say to that?
SK: I’d guess if you already created a post where people absolve you of any guilt you might have, you’re already feeling a bit guilty.
Florida Woman: For not wearing a mask? No I don’t feel guilty. I just needed some advice on how to rebut the people claiming selfishness etc for NOT wearing them.
SK: Why do you feel the need to rebut them? Like, what does it accomplish?
Florida Woman: Spreading awareness
SK: About what though, because I’m pretty sure the entire country is aware of the situation we’re in.
Florida Woman: I was honestly completely terrified by this when it first started coming out. I’m so thankful I had my “aha” moment, started to question things, and actually started doing a little digging and stopped believing all the fear-mongering MSM.
There are so many women in the group I’m in that are still just as scared for themselves or their families as I was. It was a horrible feeling having so much anxiety and fear so if I can help to get some of whoever sees my comments to stop for a second and go hm, maybe something isn’t quite adding up, then I’ll go through the back and forth to try and get there.
You certainly cannot change everyone’s minds and people have to be willing to have an open mind in the first place.
But even if I can’t win over the person I was talking with someone else will see my comments and hopefully start doing their own digging as well and get out of that horrible cycle of fear.
*At this point I could feel my eyebrow twitch a little. I could have said many things. I could have beaten her down with my academic credentials to assert my credibility to tell her the quality of the sources she is consuming are the central issue. I could have had the moment with her that she wanted to have with the people who called her a monster. But I decided to speak to her with a level of civility and care that we should at least attempt with the “other side.”
SK: Well my new friend, I’m liberal-leaning (don’t shoot lol) and I’m also very concerned. We’ve lost more in a few weeks from COVID (59k) than we have in the entirety of the Vietnam war (58k US Servicemen). We have a right to feel angry, afraid, and we have a right to grieve and the news certainly doesn’t help.
People are drinking bleach thinking it will cure COVID, believing themselves to be enlightened and privy to inside knowledge outside MSM. This concerns me.
Florida Woman: Lol guns are holstered. I don’t care what your political views are. This shouldn’t be a dividing political struggle, but one that brings us all together. This is affecting all of our liberties-not just Democrat’s or Republicans. But of course, unfortunately, everything ends up politicized to divide us so we won’t present a united front. MSM is slanted as we all know and going both ways. The news is not just the news anymore and hasn’t been for a while. :/
SK: Agreed! A large portion of this [problem] is the platform we’re currently communicating on. It allows people to curate news feeds to suit their preferences (both Republican and Democrat) and that can easily turn into an echo chamber where the “other side” is dehumanized and actions taken against them become righteous.
We live in a clickbait era. If something grabs our attention and more or less aligns with our values, we’ll be less likely to maintain a critical eye for information that is false, misleading, or incomplete.
To add to this, some nations have a vested interest in sowing discord among racial, ethnic, and gendered lines. When you combine bad faith actors with a platform like Facebook (where many of us have curated our feeds so that very little of the “other side” comes through, we create the perfect echo chamber to dull our critical thinking skills.
And this is my last point, something many in this group may feel, but have not articulated.
When we exist in echo chambers that dull our critical thinking skills, the people at the very top benefit. Now, when I say the people at the very top, I’m not talking about Soros or the Illuminati lol, but the oligarchs, the Jeff Bezos’s of the world who’ve asked to donate their sick time rather than pay people a living wage, despite them being some of the wealthiest people in the country.
They benefit from us fighting because as long as we’re fighting, we’re too distracted to realize just how much they are fucking us. Pardon my French.
Florida Woman: Completely agree with all of that. I have been sharing a ton on my FB page and welcome opposition because it makes me have to prove what I’m sharing. I’d be wrong if I didn’t say I want to be right haha but I also don’t want to post articles that have been disproven or not proven at all so I appreciate the pushback so I can check myself.
SK: And that’s beautiful!
SK: So, all this being said, imagine you have switched roles with the person who has called you a monster. Can you imagine what might be motivating them to make such a statement?
No Answer.
