My Epic Exchange with MRA Thought Leader Karen Straughan — A Retrospective
After my epic exchange with MRA queen Karen Straughan in a YouTube comment section, I contemplated it. It’s not every day that I encounter someone who thinks very differently to how I do, and expresses those divergent thoughts at some length.
So what do I think of Karen Straughan’s views in the exchange I had with her, in retrospect? I can’t say I’m impressed.
I started out telling her she would end up realizing she should have been far more skeptical of Trump and his supporters’ claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, because they’re false claims. I didn’t say this because I can read the future, I said it because it’s obvious right now that these claims are bogus. Apparently she can’t perceive this, which is already not saying much about her ability to tell fact from fiction.
Still, Straughan said that she didn’t know how much voter fraud was going on… but she’s sure it’s going on. Although this seems incoherent, I guess it shows at least some appropriate uncertainty about Trump’s voter fraud narrative. She added that she believes there’s voter fraud because the Democrats were “absorbed with factually flimsy and legally dubious attempts to oust [Trump]” during his presidency. She then mentioned the Trump-Russia investigation.
Straughan said she has a forthcoming YouTube video about the Trump-Russia investigation. I’m fascinated to see what will be in this video, because she has a steep hill to climb. First, she needs to establish that the Trump-Russia investigation was an investigation by the Democrats, when the conventional view is that it was initiated and conducted by the FBI (note: in case this isn’t obvious, political parties don’t run the FBI).
Then Straughan has to establish that the FBI had no basis to investigate Trump and Trump’s campaign, and that there was no basis for the FBI to investigate Trump’s subsequent actions for obstuction of justice. She then has to establish that the Inspector General, after reviewing the completed investigation, was wrong to say the investigation had no political bias.
Even if Straughan were correct that the Democrats had a hand in the Trump-Russia investigation, it still doesn’t establish that they orchestrated mass voter fraud in favour of Biden in the 2020 presidential election. This appears to be an argument from evil: “The Democrats are such bad people that of course they would use mass voter fraud to win the election”. Needless to say, this isn’t a great argument because even if the Democrats are so bad it doesn’t account for other variables necessary to evaluate whether voter fraud occurred.
The other noteworthy aspect of our exchange is how she treated two bits of information she learned about the election.
One was a post-election survey that apparently showed a decent number of Biden voters didn’t know about the alleged Joe Biden/Hunter Biden corruption story, but if they had known about it a large enough proportion of them wouldn’t have voted for Biden, and it would have swayed the election for Trump.
The other was about how Michael Bloomberg paid off fines for Black and Hispanic felons in Florida so they could be re-enfranchised (in Florida felons lose their right to vote and don’t regain it until all their court fines are paid off). Those voters are part of a demographic that’s highly likely to vote for Democrats.
Straughan seemed to feel disturbed by those two facts, and that I should feel the same way. But I’m not disturbed because I evaluate these two facts very differently from her. She seems to look at them in isolation, and to treat them as part of the nefarious actions of the Democrats and the political class that she feels overwhelmingly supports the Democrats. With the Joe Biden corruption story, she’s referring to the “media blackout” about it.
By contrast, I look at facts like the ones she cited in a broader context. The first question is whether there was truly a media blackout about the Joe Biden/Hunter Biden corruption story. It’s indisputable that Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story. Non-conservative media outlets also didn’t seem very interested in the story because they deemed that it wasn’t newsworthy. Their usual justification was that the evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption was too thin.
I happen to disagree with Twitter and Facebook’s decision to suppress the story, not merely because if they want to suppress information they should be principled about it, but also because their attempt to suppress a story like that is likely to backfire and make the story even more widely known anyway, which is exactly what happened.
That last point is key, because the only way Twitter and Facebook’s attempts at suppressing the Biden corruption story could have caused it to become more widely known is that there exists highly engaged, highly active and popular pro-Trump media sources. Indeed, the suppression of the story became a story in itself.
What Straughan doesn’t understand or acknowledge is that there’s an extremely effective pro-Trump/pro-Republican propaganda media ecosystem that is unconcerned with the truth and capable of manufacturing or wildly exaggerating the misdeeds of Democrats for their own partisan goals. This is why Hillary Clinton’s emails were such an obsession in the media leading up to her 2016 presidential election bid, way out of proportion to their importance.
Prior to that, Hillary Clinton had been the obsessive focus of Republicans and pro-Republican media falsely alleging she’d done something wrong as secretary of state during the 2012 Benghazi attack. At that time, Clinton was already the presumptive nominee for the Democratic party leadership. The evidence showed no such wrongdoing on her part.
It’s clear the non-conservative media are not neutral, non-partisan observers with no agenda. However, the extent to which non-conservative media is biased, misleading, duped by their sources, or outright lying is not symmetric with the conservative media ecosystem. This isn’t because conservatives are more gullible, it’s simply because the conservative media ecosystem spreads more disinformation and creates tighter partisan bubbles.
Taken in this context, the fact some voters didn’t know about the Biden corruption story but said they would have voted differently if they had known about it, doesn’t carry much weight. It’s clear voters of all kinds are not fully informed about all sorts of issues prior to making their decisions on who to vote for, and those on the right are particularly misinformed if they belong to the aforementioned tight conservative partisanship bubble.
So if someone is going to ask “how might voters have acted differently if they’d known about the Biden corruption story?” I also want to ask “how might they have acted differently if they’d known about all the details of Donald Trump’s scandals?”. Because there were so many scandals and controversies surrounding Trump. Even if the Joe Biden corruption story is true, Biden still wouldn’t be within sniffing distance of Donald Trump’s misbehaviour.
Note that this isn’t an argument that two wrongs make a right. It’s a simple argument about lesser evils in a two-party system. It’s also an argument about how misleading it can be to focus on a singular issue divorced from the bigger picture. Straughan used that same faulty reasoning with how she interpreted Bloomberg raising money to re-enfranchise Black and Hispanic felons by paying their fines.
First, Straughan likened Bloomberg’s efforts to vote buying, an illegal act. Although Bloomberg’s actions were clearly made for partisan gain – because he knows Black and Hispanic people vote for Democrats – they simply weren’t an example of vote buying. The people Bloomberg re-enfranchised had no obligation to vote for the Democratic candidate, let alone vote at all.
Straughan comparing Bloomberg’s tactic to vote buying meant she was giving it negative moral valence. Setting aside whether something illegal is morally wrong, Straughan’s characterization was just inaccurate. Still, I conceded that Bloomberg’s actions were a “dirty tactic”, although in retrospect that might have been conceding too much. At this time, I’m not sure how to evaluate it morally.
In any case, once again Straughan looked at Bloomberg’s actions in isolation, condemning them morally, whereas I looked at them in broader context. And in a broader context, we see that Republicans have been making a concerned effort at suppressing the votes of minorities for the last two decades. They also know that Black people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, so they routinely try to disenfranchise them or otherwise make it harder for them to vote.
In Florida in particular, there has been a history of disenfranchising Black voters. Ex-felons were barred from voting in that state, which had the effect of barring one in five Black Floridians from voting. This changed in 2018 with a successful ballot initiative that amended the state’s constitution. The amendment only came about because activists managed to gather enough signatures to force the initiative.
Soon after this constitutional amendment, the Republican legislature of Florida made it so felons would have to pay all their fines and fees before their voting rights could be restored. This law was obviously aimed at undermining the successful ballot initiative, with a clear partisan goal: (re)suppressing the Black vote in Florida.
Put into this context, Bloomberg’s efforts at re-enfranchising Black felons by paying their fines and fees was an attempt at countering the Republican efforts at suppressing their votes. Even if Bloomberg’s actions could be deemed dirty politics, they are perfectly understandable in a climate where the opposing party is playing even dirtier politics. It’s hugely misleading to focus on Bloomberg’s actions outside the full context of the history of felon disenfranchisement in Florida, and Republican-led voter suppression in general.
In sum, I found that Straughan made more sophisticated arguments than your average YouTube brute, but that she seemed outfitted with partisan blinders. I had first suggested to her that she was falling prey to motivated reasoning, and our exchange only bolstered my view that this is how her mind operates when she’s analyzing these issues. Rather than striving to be an unbiased, objective seeker of truth, she seems to be deeply ideological.
To some, this might not be surprising. If I tell some of my friends “hey so I had an exchange with an MRA on YouTube and I found them not to be very good at thinking critically”, they’d probably say “of course not, they’re an MRA”. Fair enough. But Straughan is a smart person, and anyone who thinks she could be dismissed as “just an MRA” (and therefore out to lunch) might be surprised at how skillful she is at rebutting feminists’ arguments. That skill was not on display in our exchange.
