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“bow the knee to this new dictatorship”: the many faces of flak

Introduction: Collateral Flak Damage

Before elaborating a theory of flak, I will begin by considering the impact on a person’s life to be implicated in a mediatized flak storm.

As is widely known, President William J. Clinton was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, then acquitted by the Senate in 1998–99. The series of events was a spin-off from an affair that he had with an intern that, in turn, was a spin-off of a special counsel’s investigation of an unrelated matter. I posit this tawdry series of episodes that clotted the U.S. political stage during most of the 1990s as flak in search of a real scandal. The investigation originated with the contrived Whitewater investigations of a resort development deal in Arkansas in the late 1970s. Bill and Hillary Clinton lost money as the deal collapsed, in part due to an unscrupulous and erratic business partner (Conason & Lyons, 2000). In turn, their partner James B. MacDougal was later convicted of 18 felonies around his stewardship of a savings and loan institution.

Fast-forwarding to the 1990s, Whitewater hypertrophied into “at least four separate but overlapping federal probes” into the Clintons, at a cost ←23 | 24→of $50 million (Qui, 2015). And the outcome of the high-powered investigatory efforts, contrived by the Republican Party opposition? While the drumbeat of flak insinuation echoed across news cycles for six years, the series of special counsels scrutinizing the Clintons came up empty handed on Whitewater—albeit, not for lack of time and effort. The special counsel’s final report in 2000 “concluded that there was insufficient evidence to show that either President Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had committed any crimes in connection with the Arkansas real estate venture that vexed his presidency through two terms” (Lewis, 2000, para. 1). Indeed, fifteen prosecutions occurred around MacDougal’s savings and loan—against grifters such as MacDougal himself and Clinton accuser/opportunist David Hale—as part of the 1980s deregulation-enabled crime wave in the savings and loan industry (Pizzo, Fricker, & Muolo, 1989); a wave on which the Clintons were not riding, but that crashed on them via the later political flak storm.

The special counsel’s null finding in 2000 against the Clintons was no surprise. By 1996, the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters had “deposed 274 witnesses and held 60 days of public hearings, during which 136 witnesses testified” (Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters, 1996, p. 1). Under the direction of Chair Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, the Committee parsed approximately one million pages of documents submitted by the Clintons, the White House, federal agencies and witnesses. What did this massive sleuthing effort uncover? In a word, nothing: page 466 of the Special Committee’s Final Report pithily concludes, “The evidence demonstrated that no improprieties occurred in connection with any of these areas of inquiry” as concerned Whitewater and the Clintons.¹

Investigations into Whitewater and related phantom scandals limped on for several more years after D’Amato’s committee came up with nil. Flaking to pretend a scandal is in motion can almost be as good as the real item; that is, when the charade generates news coverage that flags a “problem” with something as concerns the flak target. Scrutiny into Clinton was a matter of investigating a person to find a wrongdoing—in contrast with the normal procedure of investigating a wrongdoing to find the person (or people) who did it. In any event, the Whitewater pantomimes finally tripped onto the peepshow optics of sex scandal in which the sitting president had inappropriate relations.

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In 2017, following the death of Roger Ailes, Monica Lewinsky described having been dragooned into the 1990s Clinton flak wars. Ailes was the head of the (at the time, fledgling) Fox News network when the scandal exploded in 1998—and he “made certain his anchors hammered” at the sex scandal, “ceaselessly, 24 hours a day” (Lewinsky, 2017, para. 2). At least one Fox executive posits that coverage of whether Lewinsky was a “tramp” heralded the tabloid circus that propelled the network from curiosity to powerhouse (Lewinsky, 2017, para. 8).

Lewinsky, 24-years old when the scandal erupted, recalls that, “My character, my looks, and my life were picked apart mercilessly. Truth and fiction mixed at random”—but not in a college campus dining hall, but for the whole world and “in the service of higher ratings” (2017, para. 5). “No rumor was too unsubstantiated, no innuendo too vile” for Fox as it torched Clinton with Lewinsky as tertiary target (2017, para. 6). Lewinsky was concerned about being indicted and could not readily leave her house for fear of being pursued by a news media scrum. Not surprisingly, the young woman entertained thoughts of suicide. Lewinsky also observes that an online platform, Drudge Report, broke the news of the affair that then cascaded onto more mainstream platforms—a pattern still evident in which flak campaigns often originate under the radar. While the now-middle aged Lewinsky has gone on to a productive life, an extraordinary testimony to her character, what she experienced when flak against Clinton graduated into scandal presents a bracing vision of how devastating a harassment campaign can be.

A Road Map

Having briefly considered the phenomenal experience of being caught in a flak-to-scandal campaign, I will attempt a more fine-grained account of what flak is. This chapter’s efforts at fleshed-out definition will implicate flak’s relation to scandal; its scale; the contrast between flak-in-discourse and flak-in-action; the taxonomy of targets toward which flak is directed; and what flak is not (fake news, conspiracy theory, activism). At the same time, while this investigation is not a media effects study, flak’s mediated dimensions necessarily implicate audiences. Thus, the discussion begs the question of how audiences decode texts—as well as the question of how audiences are constituted in the twenty-first century in ways that dovetail with flak. A brisk history of post-World War II concepts of the audience, an indispensable element of a flak campaign, initiates the discussion.

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Re-Inventing the Audience

The State project of unlocking the secrets of the audience was present at the establishment of communication as an academic discipline within the Cold War environment (Simpson, 1994). Human cognition and behavior is embedded within embodied experience and an infinite regress of social contexts within social contexts; and, for this reason, the project of predicting and controlling audience behavior has long been a conundrum. During the Cold War, Bernard Berelson and collaborators acknowledged they came up short in ascertaining what moved the needle for an audience: “Some kinds of communication […] on some kinds of issues, brought to some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects” (Berelson et al., quoted in Franklin, 2004, p. 207).

In the same era, Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues venture a more definite account of the audience through their concept of reinforcement effect (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1969). They report that, during an election campaign, audience members seek out messages that confirm pre-standing predilections that “close the deal” for their vote. At the same time, the researchers conclude that audience members construct figurative walls to thwart discordant messages. In this manner, Lazarsfeld and colleagues posit audiences as actively parsing messages as well as being conditioned by social influences (e.g., co-workers respected for knowledge) situated between an audience member and the text.

With the advent of Cultural Studies after the 1960s, audiences were endowed with further powers by academic observers of them. For cultural studies scholars, audience members were generally envisioned as active decoders in partly or globally rejecting mediated premises as, for example, primers for celebration of classism (Hall, 1993). Decoding models developed in the mid-twentieth were nonetheless grounded in a media environment with far fewer broadcast platforms. In the 1970s, audiences in the United States essentially had three television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) from which to forage for their nightly programming. As a result, researchers could assume heterogeneous audiences to the era’s dominant television medium that were exposed to similar content. When everyone—from school children to grandmas, from all regions and social classes—saw similar programming, it was easy to begin with the premise that different audience members decode Laverne and Shirley very differently.

Beginning with the dissemination of cable television in the 1980s, mass broadcast audiences began to splinter, driven by the marriage of new ←26 | 27→technology to capitalist logics of audience segmentation into more striated market niches. Segmentation enables far more precise advertising appeals tailored to audience demographics and psychographics, beginning with the audience’s class characteristics (Hesmondhalgh, 2010, pp. 288–289).

Theorizations of media power that Des Freedman (2014) dubs “control models” assume strong media effects (audience moved this way and that, as if by joystick)—and they have long been marginal in media studies. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, investigators gleefully turned control models on their heads; audiences were not controlled by mass media, in this view, but had become increasingly important producers of discourse. Dan Gillmor’s We the media (2004) and Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) insist on utopian hopes come true on new media platforms. The global brain’s crowd wisdom was posited as plugged in and the so-called ex-audience had commandeered the printing presses. In Bloggers on the bus, Eric Boehlert (2009) envisions news media’s monopoly on insider-oriented news as broken, to the benefit of independent journalism and a better-informed public. Sophisticated blogs, such as Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed territory, could and did attract audiences of hundreds-of-thousands in startlingly short intervals (Boehlert, 2009, pp. 179–192), a democratization of the printing press not previously observed.

As is now more widely appreciated, new media has also unleashed a regime of fine print (Sterne, 2012), appropriation by illiberal regimes (Morozov, 2011) and Stasi-plus surveillance (Goodman, 2015). Moreover, after a couple of decades of shakeout, new media has replicated many of the features (concentration of wealth, power and audiences) of the dinosaur media that it ostensibly supplanted (Fuchs, 2014). Twentieth-century media was mass media and it attempted to synchronize a collective heartbeat for society through shared mediated experience that reached most all of society—a Sisyphean task, for reasons given. However, in a neoliberal era of pervasive audience surveillance and mass customization/market segmentation (Andrejevic, 2004), there is no logic to even support an effort to convene the whole nation together. Instead, “killer facts” and narratives effectively seek out their audience niches. On social media, unwanted or jarring messages can be shunted off by the silent work of the algorithmic filter bubble that is, in turn, fueled by data mining toward finely-grained audience segmentation. As Delia Dumitrica observes, the tailoring of messages on Facebook is relentless and creates an apparently seamless ecosystem glossed as one’s preferred, “natural” habitat: “My identity, my friends, my world: the Facebook mediated global imaginary rests upon (the ←27 | 28→illusion of) choice. Today, choice is the epitome of agency, as well as a core neoliberal value” (Dumitrica, 2016, p. 199).

In turn, audience surveillance for purposes of prediction and control has achieved very high levels of sophistication. Facebook “Likes” furnish a powerful psychographic portrait of a person to whom well-tailored messages can be directed. Marcel Kosinski and colleagues explain the state of the science by 2013: “Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender” (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013, p. 5802). Kosinski and colleagues’ conclusions are grounded in a massive sample “of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests” (2013, p. 5802). After extracting out which “likes” cluster together and correlate with what traits from the psychometric tests, Kosinski and colleagues constructed models that can make accurate inferences about Facebook users. In turn, these inferences lend themselves to well-tailored, psychographics-informed messaging.

In follow-up studies, the efficacy of Facebook data for tailored messaging has been empirically confirmed across very large populations using “ecologically-valid” (non-laboratory) methods. Kosinski and colleagues report that inferences from even a small number of Facebook likes powerfully heightens the impact of targeted messages on observable behaviors: “In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases” (Matz, Kosinski, Nave, & Stillwell, 2017, p. 12714). Facebook likes enable inferences into personality, for example, tendencies toward introversion/extraversion and open/closed postures toward new experience. Utilizing these inferences to tailor messages shows notable effects across large audiences: “Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40-percent more clicks and up to 50-percent more purchases” as compared with control groups (2017, p. 12714). Messages that are 40- or 50-percent more likely to elicit the messenger’s desired response can be said to have gone an appreciable distance toward prediction and control over audience response.

Fast-forwarding to the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, Alexander Nix (2016) of Cambridge Analytica discusses the use of psychographics in ←28 | 29→political advertising. In particular, the model that Nix endorses as powerful captures an audience member’s openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (acronymized as OCEAN). Informed by data-driven precision, a pro-gun ad can be designed on the assumption that distinctly different, psychographics-rooted motivations can stimulate a person’s support for guns. Pro-gun ads can thusly be designed for framing around safety (e.g., “your home invaded”)—or, alternatively, around tradition that appeals to arms passed “from father to son,” in a traditional androgenic lineage (Nix, 2016). In other words, psychographic approaches assay to take the pulse of motivations and the internal lives of specific audience members—and do so for instrumental purposes of blasting impactful messages directed at a particular person’s psychological makeup.

In this environment that draws on detailed portraits of audience members, the producers of messages encounter far less guesswork and risk of having their messages ignored. Messages can be designed to more readily push a given person’s idiosyncratic buttons than the billboard by the highway that radiates the same message to all who pass it. Control model visions of “hypodermic needle” messaging injected directly into the audience may never be realized. Nevertheless, psychographics-informed messaging can plausibly take significant steps toward heightened prediction and control of audience reactions when applied on a mass scale.

The implications for flak are straightforward as concerns crafting messages that will reach an audience member’s wheelhouse, wherever it may be. Moreover, flak memes more readily gain legs under them by making a debut before what could be called “a pre-existing hostile audience” that is inclined to seize on the negativism of flak toward a disfavored entity (Katherine Cross, quoted in Jeong, 2018, p. 25); it is also the type of like-minded audience that is also far easier to convene in a segmented media environment.

Two phenomena of further interest to the study of flak gain impetus in the new millennium’s new media environment: directional motivation and illusory truth. As concerns the former, D.J. Flynn and colleague’s recent review of the literature suggests movement full circle back to Lazarsfeld: “Directionally motivated reasoning leads people to seek out information that reinforces their preferences (i.e., confirmation bias), counterargue information that contradicts their preferences (i.e., disconfirmation bias), and view proattitudinal information as more convincing than counterattitudinal information” (2017, p. 132). Flynn and colleagues are not optimistic about how, within an avalanche of messages, audiences ←29 | 30→resolve the tension between sorting out the truth and finding reinforcement: “Facts are always at least potentially vulnerable to directional motivated reasoning, especially when they are politicized by elites.” As a result, contemporary political conflict is not simply arguing over the narrower matters of “issues and public policy, but over reality itself” (emphasis added; Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017, p. 144). When a concept of shared reality itself becomes increasingly contested, flak correspondingly thrives in the hot-house of ideologically-driven niches.

The concept of illusory truth also furnishes impetus for making outlandish claims in service of flak to influence audiences. Gordon Pennycook and colleagues (2018) report a series of experiments in which subjects appraise demonstrated-to-be-false headlines as significantly more plausible for having previously seen them only one time. The effect of even one prior exposure on plausibility measurably endures for at least a week. Wholly implausible control condition statements get no such boost for familiarity (e.g., positing the Earth is square), while true statements still rate higher than false ones. Nonetheless, the study underlines the incentive to move the needle of opinion via repeated tendentious statements, since the feeling of familiarity in having “heard this one before” is readily conflated with plausibility.

Indeed, the audience may not even be the flesh-and-blood audience anymore—at least not completely. The strategic use of bots and cyborg social media accounts can be managed to move the needle of opinion, in part, by circumventing the need to influence the minds of real persons. Molly K. McKew (2018) of the New Media Frontier details one such campaign in 2018. The campaign pushed Congressperson Devin Nunes’ so-called “intelligence memo” that flaked Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to Trumpian specifications. Deliberate coordination and amplification of tweets by right-wing activists and Russian cyber-agents across 11 days pushed the “release the memo” topic into a trending one—and did so with a boost from “audience members” who were not anyone’s friends and neighbors, but tweet-amplifying-through-retweeting bots. A simulated audience performed for a real one to push the hashtag. Phenomena along these lines have become prevalent enough that it has a name—computational propaganda—and a unit at Oxford University dedicated to its study.

In other words, the contemporary moment has realized the long-held dream of at least partly interrupting the monologues of the media oligopolies of the twentieth century. At the same time, new media platforms have, by the advent of the third decade of the millennium, exhibited characteristics ←30 | 31→(rigorous segmenting of the audience, deployment of surveillance and psychographics) that lend themselves to an intensifying flak regime.

Having considered the audience, a necessary element to a flak campaign, I will now orient to basic dimensions of understanding flak; to begin, what is the scale of what I am defining as flak?

Definition: What Is/Is Not Flak?

In the previous chapter, I defined flak as tactics and strategies toward political harassment. To reiterate, flak is permeated with power, it is purposefully employed toward sociopolitical goals, and weaponized to disparage, delegitimize, and disable people and organizations. Below, I will endeavor to make the term less abstracted and ascribe more concrete characteristics to it. I will also delineate flak subtypes, in part through pertinent case studies. The stakes of this discussion are that flak often arises from the shadows to menace its targets with sadistic, bad faith scrutiny and delegitimization. In constructing a detailed account of flak, naming it and its sub-types, flak itself becomes the unwilling object of scrutiny—albeit, with demands for accuracy and dispassion that do not perturb flak discourses.

Flak: How Big?

There are situations that are too serious to merit description as flak; murder, for example. Flak-mongers seek to kill a reputation rather than a person, as cashiering someone’s good name is sufficient for flak purposes. Similarly, physical assault is beyond flak for its literal bare-knuckled quality.

Flak should also not be construed as identity-based prejudice that is embedded in structural (often legalized, officially-sanctioned) forms of harassment to beat down subaltern populations. Examples of prejudice embedded in institutional practices include the terrors of Jim Crow in the United States. The more recent “hostile environment” program in the United Kingdom is also more than flak as it was the platform for undifferentiated harassment of immigrants in their regular encounters with the State (e.g., in the hospital, at school, with police officers in the streets). I posit that these chauvinistic practices are more serious than flak in their society-wide scale and diffusion into some of the everyday details of the victims’ lives. That said, systemic abuses surely have smaller flak episodes embedded within them—but are distinct from flak campaigns in being systemized by ←31 | 32→deeply inscribed custom and law in the first place. By contrast with diffuse systematic abuses, flak that is directed at and focused on a specific person or organization toward clear political objectives presents flak’s most evident and damaging form.

Some phenomena are too big to be called flak while others are too limited in scope. Schoolyard bullying and malicious neighborhood gossip do not qualify, serious as they are within their own environments, for lacking wider impact. Similarly, episodes of trolling are traumatic and cause depthless pain for the victims. However grotesque and even criminal when it exceeds protected speech as credible death threats, trolling is not flak, as I am defining it. Trolling lacks a clear political dimension when wholly constituted by personal abuse; caveats to follow.

Before I offer those caveats, consider the example of the South Korean “Dog Poop Girl” (hereafter, DPG). In 2005, DPG refused to clean the fecal matter that her dog deposited on a metro train floor, despite exhortations from others on the train. After observers recorded and disseminated the episode, DPG was the target of furious rebuke and eventually retreated from her university studies (Detel, 2013). Harassment of DPG was wildly out of proportion with her admittedly gross transgression—but it does not rise to the level of flak as there was no tangible sociopolitical goal implicated in the invective.

By contrast, in 2013 in the United Kingdom, Caroline Criado Perez successfully campaigned for a woman to be featured on a British banknote. One may call this campaign feminist or female-friendly and it led to Jane Austen replacing Charles Darwin on the “tenner.” It also led to “50 tweets an hour being hurled toward her, including rape threats” (Jeong, 2018, p. 13). Sarah Jeong cites several more cases of women being abused online with a clearly gendered dimension that is, in effect, meant to harass all women. In the case of Zoë Quinn’s “Gamergate” ordeal, Jeong posits her former paramour Eron Gjoni as having “managed to crowdsource domestic abuse” (2018, p. 17). Moreover, Jeong observes that internet bots with female names are subject to “25 more times ‘malicious private messages” than male-named bots (2018, p. 20); chauvinism toward real people is, apparently, easy to project on to non-existent people.

The upshot is that trolling of a person may be salted with sociopolitical issues that indicate a campaign to intimidate and harass broader social groups. Online furies may thereby cross an unmarked frontier into the domain of flak when the abuse is more than trolling a convenient target with personal antipathy. In these instances, flaksters bring on board a palpable sociopolitical ←32 | 33→dimension that is, nonetheless, far less structural and lacking in the formal authority of Jim Crow or the “hostile environment.” I will return to this point with further examples later in discussing issue-oriented as well as “ambient,” meta-ideological flak.

Scandal—and Its Evil Twin

What flak is and is not is at the heart of its relation to scandal.

Published near the dawn of the Internet age, John B. Thompson’s Political Scandal parsimoniously identifies three temporal phases of his book’s titular subject (2000, p. 24). Thompson posits that scandal consists, first, of a transgression of consequence, coupled with an effort to hide the misbehavior. In the second phase, information leaks despite efforts to suppress it and hints of wrongdoing enter circulation. Third and finally, at an unmarked tipping point, the scandal becomes a full-blown story with the attendant disapprobation and further scrutiny.

Thompson posits that, in recent centuries, scandals have become heavily mediated events. In this view, media narratives are not “secondary or incidental” but “partly constitutive” of scandal (2000, p. 61). As journalistic and/or State investigation into the scandal ramps up, the public can become absorbed in the drip-by-drip developments. As Thompson observes, the scandal narrative plays out like “a good novel” as audiences “assess the veracity of the protagonists, to figure out the plot and to predict its resolution” (2000, p. 73). After scandal has gone into motion, investigation commences with an opportunity to clean up the political sphere. In Thompson’s words, this is a public good since “scandals have highlighted hidden activities which were of questionable propriety and have helped to stimulate important debates about the conduct and accountability of those who exercise power” (2000, p. 263). In this view, scandals animate the cleansing rigors of search for the truth.

Scandal and Flak: What’s the Difference?

Like scandal, flak depends upon mediatization and it also lends itself to being narrativized as an absorbing story. However, I posit several irreducible differences between flak and Thompson’s account of scandal.

To start, Thompson does not address flak—which is not surprising since scandal remains a far more recognized term. However, for largely eliding strategically weaponized discourses, Thompson effectively collapses flak into ←33 | 34→scandal. The cover of his book features Clinton with head-bowed as the poster-boy of political scandal. In the text inside the cover, Thompson also amalgamates the many discourses and investigations around Clinton as scandal. In other words, Thompson does not differentiate the flak fishing expeditions around Clinton—notably the insipid nothing-burger of Whitewater—from the eventual sex scandal that years of flak yielded. This example underscores the need to tease flak from scandal and to identify what distinguishes them.

Thompson construes scandal as concerned with investigating and determining whether wrongdoing has occurred—or, importantly, has not occurred. However, flak does not conform to the same model or its logics. If political agents want to launch episodes of flak, an actual transgression or reasons to believe one has occurred (the first phase in Thompson’s schematic) are not needed to commence the mediated discourse about wrongdoings. In terms of Thompson’s schematic, a flak discourse goes directly to the third phase of disapprobation along with stepped-up (State and/or media) scrutiny. Simply acting as if there has been a transgression and proceeding from there will suffice for flak purposes! Furthermore, unlike the processes around scandal, flak-mongers are uninterested in whether there is an underlying truth to accusations. Stirring up a flak storm with its attendant scrutiny and passions is the objective in itself; and the lack of resolution around flak claims can mean that the flak narrative continues indefinitely. In these respects, flak is the evil twin of scandal that it mimics.

Consider the hideous, years-long campaign against Barack H. Obama as to his nation of birth, meant to impugn his basic qualifications for the presidency. While this flak discourse did not achieve mainstream play, it lingered like a low-level outbreak of dysentery in swampier districts of opinion. Nonetheless, the Hawaii State Health Department felt compelled to address the “birther” flak spasms by producing the scanned version of Obama’s long form birth certificate—thereby setting off a new flak round of specious denunciations of the birth certificate as a forgery (Mikkelson, 2011). The “birther” flak campaign went straight to disapprobation, in Thompson’s schematic of scandal—and then lurched onward, indifferent to resolution via evidence, enacting an infinite loop of accusation and disapprobation, all in contrast with a genuine scandal.

Thompson’s magisterial work on scandal nonetheless anticipates what I am describing as flak, even if he does not further explore it. Thompson warns of the “roving searchlight” and avers that the essential functions of investigation into scandal must be “insulated from partisan interests” through “a clear ←34 | 35→remit and a well-defined focus” (2000, p. 269). Although he does not discuss flak, Thompson is also cognizant that a media environment characterized by untrammeled accusation becomes “conflictual, uncooperative and non-participatory”; the kind of social order riven with bilious cynicism that has come into clear view as flak has risen like a toxic plume over the political landscape. All societies have deeply inscribed divisions within them. Cynicism channeled into flak presents an instrument for exacerbating these fractures by keeping people at each other’s throats while elites hover above the fray unscathed, a phenomena that has gone global and can happen anywhere.

Flak Versus Scandal Case Study: Dissing Dilma

In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was impeached and then removed from the presidency of Brazil. The series of events presented a steep fall for the twice-elected president and her Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, or Worker’s Party) that had ruled Brazil since 2003. The series of events also illustrates that flak and scandal can be differentiated from each other—as indeed they need to be when contentious, contrived flak poses as sober scandal.

PT’s era in government registered significant successes in the decade of the 2000s. The government introduced “large scale social programs such as Bolsa Familia, which provided subsidies to poor families to buy food and other necessities,” while riding “an upswing in economic fortunes” (Arnaudo, 2017, p. 7). The resolutely un-radical World Bank enthused that, “Brazil’s socioeconomic progress has been remarkable and internationally noted,” for “innovative and effective policies to reduce poverty and ensure the inclusion of previously excluded groups”; the results “lifted millions of people out of poverty” (quoted in Chomsky, 2018, para. 24).

However, by 2016, impeachment was greeted with wide public approval due to Brazil’s faltering economy and antipathy toward across-the-board corruption. The proximal trigger to the impeachment was alleged accountancy crimes, including the timing of the government’s payment of a loan to the Bank of Brazil. Not only were Rousseff’s ostensible crimes scarcely discussed during her Senate trial, their status as crimes was itself a stretch. Stephen Mothe (2016) explains that, in Brazil,

The president can only sign a decree once it has gone through an extensive process, which includes technical and legal analyses within the Ministry of Planning and ←35 | 36→other organs. At the time in which the three decrees reached Rousseff’s desk, there was no explicit understanding that they contravened any legal norms, but rather an implicit endorsement of their compatibility with the law, dispelling any possibility of malice or willful misconduct on the part of the president. […] It was only through a posterior decision, reached under questionable circumstances, that the Audit Court found the decrees irregular, and applied this understanding retroactively. (2016, para. 7)

Once impeachment was in motion, Mothe claims that Brazil’s senators shifted ground and transformed questions about a bureaucratic procedure into a full-blown political trial. In this view, there was no scandal to speak of; but there was abundant flak-in-action.

As Brazil’s 61 senators cast their impeachment ballots, 20 of them were implicated in the sprawling lava jato (car wash) anti-corruption investigations that Dilma had enabled to go forward (Arnaudo, 2017; Caudros, 2016; Democracy Now!, 2016). Michel Temer replaced Rousseff as president—a lofty perch to reach when he had been barred from running for office for eight years due to an election fraud conviction. In a stark departure from his PT’s predecessors’ policy package and without an electoral mandate, Temer’s administration rapidly implemented a deep austerity regime that was loathed by Brazilians. Austerity, along with Temer’s recorded participation in bribery, drove his administration’s approval rating in polls into single digits (Caudros, 2016)—scandal that Temer managed to weather as he hung on for two years until the end of what had been Dilma’s elected term. Along with sandbagging the lava jato anti-corruption investigations, the flak campaign against her presidency signals restoration of traditional class hierarchy in Brazil to cancel PT’s efforts toward more widely spread prosperity.

Impeachment was flak-in-action enacted by a small circle of elites. However, the campaign against Dilma also had its vox pop (or bottom-up) dimensions, implicating large numbers of Brazilians. New media was a key conscript against Dilma’s government. During election season in 2014, candidates employed online computational propaganda, a large share of which was bot-driven. Following Dilma’s reelection, the opposition’s online apparatus was not rolled up and, instead, mobilized as a permanent flak caravan (Arnaudo, 2017). Groups such as Revoltados ON LINE and Vem Para Rua (“Go to the Street”) had 16 and four million members respectively and their messaging reached many more (an estimated 80 million people). In Dan Arnaudo’s appraisal, the online outrage was “boosted by botnets” and “helped lay the groundwork for the impeachment campaign” (2017, p. 15). Flak memes ←36 | 37→ricocheted through Brazil. Through sheer repetition, around half of Brazilians came to believe that PT had ushered illegal Haitian immigrants into Brazil for the 2014 election and that an armed drug gang was a PT affiliate. The delegitimizing flak tall-tales lubricated support for Dilma’s impeachment (Arnaudo, 2017, p. 18).

Dilma was a prisoner of Brazil’s military dictatorship, subjected to torture as a young woman at the start of the 1970s. Impeachment is a “soft” tactic by way of comparison. At the same time, if they are not confronted, the “civilized” procedures of flak may prove more destructive of governance for gutting it from inside its own system of checks and balances; in this case, by repurposing impeachment from a question of scandal to an instrument of flak.

A Survey of Sub-Categories of Flak

Having considered what flak is not—namely, scandal—I will pivot to subtypes of flak, beginning with a basic distinction between flak-in-action and flak-in-discourse. Herman and Chomsky’s original characterization of flak emphasizes its manifestations in actions; to wit, letters, phone calls, or more drastic, law suits directed at flak targets. Throughout this volume, however, I will dwell more on what I am calling flak-in-discourse than on flak-in-action by mainly analyzing texts. At the same time, I readily acknowledge an often-intimate link between discourse and action; indeed, speech can be readily regarded as at once discourse and action.

In sharper definition, what then is flak-in-discourse? It is not garden-variety talk or writing; rather, it presents weaponized forms of discourse that at some point in the chain of its production is backed with power. The authors of flak-in-discourse do not seek to inform or educate the public as an end in itself. Rather, the flakster’s objective is to inflict damage on a target. It follows that flak-in-discourse is not simply a negative review made in good faith. In this view, assessing the Los Angeles-based rock band Warpaint’s most recent recording as below-standard is not in itself flak, regardless of whether the criticisms are crude or couched in sophisticated musical analysis. Good faith criticism’s project is not to derail the musical career of Warpaint as an end in itself or to otherwise complicate the lives of the band members; and even if it was, a lone crank’s review will not have the clout to halt the band’s trajectory. In contrast with a flak campaign, a lone crank’s review is similarly unlikely to incite concrete action such as a boycott of Warpaint or a committed movement devoted to hindering the band from playing. Finally, criticism ←37 | 38→of Warpaint does not in itself rise to the level of a sociopolitical issue, thus has too faint a signature to be construed as flak.

A case study of climate change denier Christopher Monckton follows to further concretize the differences between flak-in-discourse and flak-in-action—as well as discourse and action’s proximity to and synergies with each other. In the case study, I will also introduce further terminology for flak targets (personalized/issue-oriented/meta-ideological) and flak modalities (boutique versus vox pop).

Flak-in-Action/Flak-in-Discourse Case Study: Lord of Flak

Christopher Monckton is a climate change denialist brand-name who has made presentations across the world, including in the U.S. Congress—a presentation that prompted a 48-page rebuttal from climate scientists (Hickman, 2010). In politics, Monckton was an adviser in the Conservative Party in the 1980s but has since careered further right in having been a (losing) parliamentary candidate for and deputy leader of the anti-Europe and anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party. As concerns political activity, Monckton has asserted himself to be a member of the House of Lords—an imaginative claim for which the British State has repeatedly chastised him in writing (Beamish, 2011, para. 4). He inherited the title of Lord when his father passed away but is not a member of the House of Lords entitled to vote with the parliamentary body. Monckton has also, inexplicably, claimed to have been awarded the Nobel Prize and to have formulated an elixir that is effective against AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and the common cold (Bickmore, 2010). Notice that this brief survey of documented claims by Monckton about his CV constitutes description with implicit criticism—not flak!

As concerns discourses on climate change, Monckton has made public power point presentations in which he purports to demolish the pillars of climate science. One of Monckton’s performances in 2009 was hosted by the Minnesota Free Market Institute on the Bethel University campus. Climate researcher John Abraham of University of Saint Thomas in Minneapolis attended the event. In response, Abraham crafted a university class-session length power point slide show with voice-over that he posted on his campus’ server. Abraham’s response adhered closely to the scientific issues and characterized Monckton as an engaging presenter—if decisively wrong on substance, hence the need for rebuttal.

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Barry Bickmore, a self-described “Republican scientist [who] advocates sane energy policies” at Brigham Young University, described Abraham’s slide show as “an exceptionally mild-mannered, careful critique of one of Monckton’s presentations” (2010, para. 75). Monckton’s response to the academically-grounded power point presentation exemplifies flak-in-discourse. He took his campaign against Abraham to Alex Jones’ InfoWars program. To wit, “Monckton described Abraham as ‘this wretched little man’ who ‘only belongs to this half-assed Christian Bible college’” (quoted in Winterer, 2012, para. 15). Saint Thomas is, in point of fact, a Catholic university. Continuing, “Monckton described Abraham’s response as ‘complete fabrication’ and ‘lie after lie after lie after lie’” (Winterer, 2012, para. 15). Monckton also referred to Saint Thomas’ president as a “creep.” On the InfoWars platform, Monckton executed a pivot from belittling flak-in-discourse to flak-in-action. Alongside the heated claims to delegitimize Abraham, Monckton appealed for listeners to contact the university’s president/creep and agitate for discipline of Abraham for his ostensible lack of professional legitimacy; flak that extended beyond words into appeals for mass action (writing emails) with the expectation of further action internal to Saint Thomas (professional reprimand).

Monckton doubled down with further discourse to seed flak-in-action, lobbed from Anthony Watts’ climate change denial flak mill, Watts up with that?:

May I ask your kind readers once more for their help? Would as many of you as possible do what some of you have already been good enough to do? Please contact Father Dennis J. Dease, President of St. Thomas University, djdease@stthomas.edu, and invite him—even at this eleventh hour—to take down Abraham’s talk altogether from the University’s servers, and to instigate a disciplinary inquiry into the Professor’s unprofessional conduct, particularly in the matter of his lies to third parties about what I had said in my talk at Bethel University eight months ago? That would be a real help. (The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, 2010, para. 7)

In an academic environment, it is laughable that a presentation such as Abraham’s that pivots almost entirely on dry scientific literature on topics such as mean ground temperatures would occasion hair-on-fire demands for a “disciplinary inquiry”; and demands for such discourse to be suppressed reek of dreaded, 200-proof political correctness. In any event, outside the academy, Monckton’s 678-word flak-in-discourse accusations on Watts up with that? triggered more than 350 comments—or, 180 pages of responses when printed, as flak-in-discourse begat further flak-in-discourse. Moreover, Monckton again crosses from flak-in-discourse intended to harm Abraham’s reputation to ←39 | 40→making an audience appeal for flak-in-action through concerted email writing to Father Dease. Numerous readers/commentators, in turn, averred that they had sent Father Dease a letter (e.g., “PJB,” SimonH,” “jaypan,” “Billy Blofeld”) as the clarion call of flak-in-action was heeded.

One reader/commentator brings added understanding of the flak technique of flooding-the-zone through flak-in-action emails by openly yearning for a deluge into Father Dease’s inbox (“Robin”, 2010). In turn, a professional organization is usually obligated to a respond to inquiries composed with a reasonable facsimile of pertinence and literacy. In this manner, a flak-in-action campaign can drain at least some time and resources of its target. The flak-in-action in this case also bids to position Abraham as the nuisance and to cultivate the idea that life on the campus would be easier without the faculty member and his slides shows. As the paroxysms of flak played out, University of Saint Thomas stood resolutely beside its faculty member. Nonetheless, Abraham acknowledges, “From the very beginning, though, I have always been concerned about the impact this might have on the University of St. Thomas. I didn’t want my actions to have a negative effect on the university” (quoted in Winterer, 2012, para. 26).

Monckton’s 678-word post on the Watts up with that? website engages with flak-in-action in another sense beyond whistling for “winged monkeys” on the internet to send emails. To wit, Monckton makes ten references to libel in his post, an unmissable attempt to play to his grandstand and to simultaneously threaten and intimidate the flak target via the prospect of legalistic flak-in-action. The not-so-veiled threats also channel a desire to criminalize academically-grounded criticism of an unfortunate venture into a field about which Monckton has militantly-held views, but no training. Moreover, Monckton’s flak-in-action threats are not an aberration. Bickmore lists, for example, seven professors against whom “Monckton has threatened to instigate academic misconduct investigations and/or libel suits” for scrutiny of his work. “Before the verdict was in” on one of the investigations he had demanded of a university, “Monckton threatened to sic the police on the university” (2010, paras. 31–32).

Where Monckton’s threats of lawsuits are concerned, two points are of further interest to a theory of flak. The first is that the threat of a lawsuit from someone backed by a movement with cash to burn (particularly if burning cash will grow the planetary carbon footprint), is anxiety-laden for the target and obviously detracts from the conduct of one’s work and life. Second, wittingly or otherwise, Monckton’s escapades also illustrate the concept of faux flak (that, in similarly alliterative terms, can be called phantom flak). ←40 | 41→In this vein, Bickmore writes that Monckton “keeps claiming (to others) on the Internet that he is going to sic his lawyers on me for ‘Lord Monckton’s Rap Sheet’, but miraculously, I haven’t been contacted by his lawyers, either” (2010, para. 32). That is, Monckton’s huffing reads as tactical flak bluff that postures as incipient flak-in-action for the grandstand. Merely threatening the lawsuit is enough to impugn one’s target to an extent—but without the actual hassle of going to (and near certainty of losing in) a court of law. To bluff in faux flak style is to pretend that, for example, this threatened lawsuit or that tranche of hacked emails are explosively damaging to their target. Act and talk like they are in fact damaging and perhaps the grandstand will believe the faux flak—particularly if the claims are repeated often enough to achieve illusory truth status.

Personalized/Issue-Oriented/Meta-Ideological Flak

As noted, Monckton’s performances illustrate a distinction between flak-in-discourse and flak-in-action; two terms that share a permeable boundary as flak-in-discourse often aspires to produce action, such as provoking an employer’s disciplinary measures. Monckton’s performances also illustrate further subtypes of flak. In particular, flak can be personalized at a given target (or, in a variation on personalization, a particular organization). Flak may also orient, more diffusely, to a sociopolitical issue. Finally, flak may be still more “ambient” and pitched toward broad meta-ideological postures that usually implicate the left-right political split. Where personalized flak is concerned, Monckton’s attacks on Abraham have been cited as examples above and bear no repeating.

As for issue-oriented flak, in Abraham’s case, Monckton’s target leads back to climate science. At the same time, the distinction between the person and the issue is also a permeable one. One quick example will suffice for illustration. Watts up with that? reader/commentator “Kirk Myers” oscillates between personalized and issues-oriented flak in the course of his or her 87-word rally to Monckton:

I was stunned by the level of scientific incompetence and the unscholarly tone exhibited by “professor” Abraham. Lord Christopher Monckton thoroughly eviscerated Abraham’s presentation, question by question and point by point. Abraham’s amateurish “hit job,” probably orchestrated with the assistance and acquiescence of other AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming] supporters, once again demonstrates the mean-spirited arrogance of many in the AGW movement, whose final line of defense of a now indefensible theory is the use of lies, distortions and ad hominem attacks. Such is the fallen state of “mainstream climate science.” (emphasis added; 2010, para. 1)

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Kirk Myers’ canned speech bears no more resemblance to Abraham’s slide presentation than it does to the plot of Casablanca, or a recipe for paella, or any other artifact one could select at random—but we will put that aside. Of interest is that Kirk Myers’ barrage of non-sequiturs assail Abraham the individual for professional conduct that is ostensibly beyond the pale—and then quickly pirouette to the issue of climate science (“AGW” in his or her shorthand) to construct Abraham as synecdoche for the larger flak target. In other words, Kirk Myers weathervanes between flaking at the person and the issue.

Ambient or meta-ideological flak goes to further levels of abstraction beyond persons (or organizations) and issues. Meta-ideological flak is evident in discourses that gesture toward connections with larger political programs; and, as noted, these programs tend toward flaking or shoring up “right” or “left” political positions. On the meta-ideological flak front, Monckton delivers again in 2014 address in Australia:

This [environmental treaty] process has nothing to do with the weather. It has nothing to do with man’s impact on the weather. It has everything to do with establishing the socialist international at the heart of the UN and making every nation bow the knee to this new dictatorship, and the climate is merely a fig leaf to cover what they are trying to do. (emphasis added; quoted in Smith & Jalsevac, 2015, para. 7)

The Life Site reporters solemnly aver that Monckton has—apparently by the sheer force of rhetoric—discovered a “concealed push for a one-world government” that is further asserted to be proceeding to hard-left specifications. To summarize, a person (e.g., Abraham), an issue (climate change), or a meta-ideology (right-wing ideology opposed to regulated capitalism and multilateral climate amelioration) may all stack up on each other in different levels of the same flak discourse.

Flak from the Boutique/Flak from the Street Corner

The Monckton discourse also illustrates a distinction between what I am naming as boutique flak and vox pop flak. Boutique flak is conceptualized as flak that presents the look and feel of discourse that is high-brow, scholarly, supported with evidence, fashioned by credentialed and seasoned experts, backed by prestige institutions dedicated to quality control of their products. Monckton’s response to Abraham is ensconced in an aura of pomp and gravity on the Watts up with that? website as a glossy, if wince-inducing pamphlet (Watts, 2010). Vox pop flak, by contrast, emanates from the grass roots, or the ←42 | 43→internet equivalent of the street corner, and speaks in the vernacular. By its nature, vox pop flak can be more plentiful. It may animate, for example, mass letter-writing via email, trending Twitter campaigns, or high-volume comment threads on web pages.

Having offered a distinction between boutique and vox pop flak, I will now complicate it. To begin, boutique flak is effectively an oxymoron. Flak does not readily lend itself to high-quality research given that it serves instrumental purposes in sociopolitical conflicts. To finesse this problem and generate information that is locked-and-loaded to be weaponized but that looks smart, think tanks of dubious-to-abysmal quality have long been concocted by elite backers (Soley, 1995). When flak disguised as scholarship is the core mission of such an organization it may be called a flak mill or, equivalently, a flak factory. In this vein, I have previously discussed think tank discourse that frequently lacks recognizable methodology or external review of its ideologically-loaded products that unambiguously reason backwards from tendentious conclusions (Goss, 2006).

However, boutique and vox pop flak can be construed as co-dependent. Boutique flak’s project is to furnish the guy on the street—or the guy up all night in stained pajamas in the flickering aura of his laptop—with putatively wise factoids and phrases in which to express flak talking points. Vox pop flak’s foot soldiers can thusly proceed with confidence that they have “prestige” backing, as they descend upon the comment section.

In this vein, in the Watts up with that? comment section discourse, vox pop participants rally to Monckton—and he is enabled to have it both ways. Monckton is constructed as the erudite answer man who furnishes exhaustive one-stop shopping for factoids, couched in “intellectual authority” to which vox pop flaksters defer; and Monckton is simultaneously construed as pure of university affiliation, a man of “the peeps” notwithstanding the elitist class background about which he ostentatiously reminds all. Ideological alchemy collapses the paradoxes of boutique and vox pop flak toward climate science.

What Flak Is Not

Having sketched out what characterizes flak and its subtypes, I will now return to differentiating it from other (better-known) terms; to wit, fake news, conspiracy theory, and activism.

The term “fake news” has spiked in usage in recent years and is up first for consideration. Throughout this volume I will eschew use of this term since ←43 | 44→its usefulness has been placed into doubt by its sheer vagueness. In July 2018, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published Disinformation and Fake News. The committee reached what seems at first blush to be a surprising conclusion about the report’s titular topic. Specifically, the Committee concluded that, “There is no agreed definition of the term ‘fake news’” (2018, p. 7). Fake news can implicate satire and parody such as The Onion or Colbert Report that—in irreducible contrast to flak—often make laudable contributions to public discourse. In turn, fake news may also signify accurate stories with misleading click-bite titles—or it may point to entirely fabricated content. In the light of these and other forms of “news” discourse that could be called fake, the Committee concludes, “we cannot start thinking about regulation and we cannot start talking about interventions, if we are not clear about what we mean” (2018, p. 7). The Committee advises “that the Government rejects the term ‘fake news’ and instead puts forward an agreed definition of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” that are generally understood to signify, respectively, deliberately or inadvertently wrong information (2018, p. 8).

Flak may also be taken as making contact with conspiracy theory. My posture toward conspiracies takes them as far less exotic and edgy than is often posited in discourses on them. At the same time, I concede that dedicated flak audiences may behave like the conspiracy-minded in adopting an infinite regress of suspicion toward evidence that proves their assumptions wrong (Bratich, 2008). That said, I am assaying to take conspiracy out of the grassy knoll and make it mundane in positing there is nothing “special” about conspiracy. It is, after all, a legal term that is vital in describing some forms of crime. In Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence operators (Mueller, 2018), the term “conspirators” is employed throughout the text to collectively describe the 12 defendants. Conspiracies exist: ergo, let us get over it. In this view, a conspiracy theory is like, any other theory, subject to empirical support that (in some lesser or greater measure) provides convincing evidence or not. That (some, many, most) theories of conspiracy can be proven wrong makes them like other theories. Moreover, I am assuming a structuralist approach, such as that which Herman and Chomsky bring to the propaganda model. In this view, analysis of deep structures, such as the dynamics of capitalism, illuminates more of how the social order functions than even an empirically proven conspiracy. For this reason, I am constructing flak as structurally-grounded concept with origins in the propaganda model, with scant further reference to conspiracies or conspiracy theory.

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Doing the Right Thing: Flak Versus Activism

I have been arguing that flak serves the public badly. At the same time, one may quite reasonably wonder what to make of citizens who have composed letters of complaint, or convened demonstrations, or boycotts for pro-social ends. In this vein, Amnesty International innovated methods of confronting authority via mass letter-writing campaigns, an advancement for human rights advocacy that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Among other examples, Amnesty’s principle method of inspiring mass letter-writing begs the question of whether it is a flak mill and whether flak may present pro-social functions. The short answer is: emphatically no. I am defining “pro-social flak” as an oxymoron. Instead, I advocate the term activism to signify pro-social actions against powerful interests and to differentiate it from flak.

Whether enacted against people who hold authority (e.g., Clinton or Dilma) or against people who demonstrably do not, a defining feature of flak is that it emanates from a position backed with substantial power. Activism, by contrast, presents guerilla-style tactics of necessity for weaker parties against stronger ones in order to leverage whatever advantage they can. Citizen numbers present that advantage where letter-writing, boycotts, or demonstrations are concerned.

Flak has on occasion been genetically modified in order to assume the veneer of activism. Campaigns for elite interests can be camouflaged as activism in what have been called AstroTurf (fake grassroots) campaigns. When AstroTurfing, industries shepherd citizens into front groups to act (even unwittingly) as their public face. For example, “smokers’ rights campaigns” have enshrouded corporate interests in smoke (Stauber & Rampton, 1995, pp. 14, 30). Flak is doused with power—and so it may necessitate the concealment of that power. Moreover, convening front groups is now easier than ever with the rise of computational propaganda. Bots may not be as loud and colorful as a crowd of citizens; but they can be tirelessly enlisted in unlimited numbers to flood the zone of online discourse as needed.

Case Study: Activist Students in a Flak Storm

It is heart-wrenching to repeat the facts: on February 14, 2018, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was the site of the most lethal mass shooting yet at a U.S. high school. The massacre claimed the lives of 17 students and injured 17 more. Following other shootings of staggering ←45 | 46→scale, the Parkland students commandeered the public discourse toward advocacy for stronger gun laws. A month later in the District of Columbia, Parkland students led the March for Our Lives, a name too chillingly literal in the light of the ongoing cascade of school shootings.

The students’ actions readily qualify as activism, regardless of whether their families are affluent. As teens yet to graduate high school, they control no appreciable assets of their own beyond assuming the high moral ground. Moreover, the students’ actions can be called activism when compared with the resources at the disposal of the gun industry and its aggressive lobby. Although the activist encounter was asymmetric in power terms, the Parkland students’ registered material victories. Notably, a gun-friendly Florida governor signed restrictions into law in short order (Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018).

The students’ articulate, uncontrived passion overwhelming impressed observers; just not all observers as the students were also subject to shockingly crass flak. InfoWars, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, Russia-linked Twitter accounts, as well as Republican Party congressperson Steve King reported for flak duty against the students (Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018; Lopez, 2018). Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza merits special mention for his rapid efforts to dismiss the students by cuing deranged flak mood music. D’Souza tweeted a photo of the shell-shocked victims in the immediate aftermath of the massacre with the caption: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs” (quoted in Nakamuta, para. 2).

Then, the flak got uglier. As noted, flak-in-discourse often takes the form of delegitimization in part through denigration and belittlement. The students’ authenticity as students was demeaned, as they were accused of being “crisis actors” and deep-state plants reading an anti-gun script. The flak memes lingered even at the epicenter of the massacre. One Parkland teacher told Politifact, “I had legitimate friends asking if [student activist] David Hogg is a real person—it was crazy” (quoted in Drobnic Holan & Sherman, 2018, para. 33).

Flak at the teenagers got personalized indeed. Emma Gonzalez was derided by a Republican Party candidate for Maine’s State House as a “skinhead lesbian” (Bremmer, 2018). Her Cuban heritage was problematized as well as (in “damned if you do/do not” terms) whether she speaks Spanish. In the weeks after her school was attacked with bullets, she was also attacked anew with comparisons to Hitler Youth (Lopez, 2018).

The aforementioned David Hogg was mocked by Fox News performer Laura Ingraham for not being admitted to college; he has since been accepted ←46 | 47→at Harvard. Hogg’s response to these cheap, demeaning jabs once again rallied to the register of activism against the millionaire Fox News factotum and the globalist conglomerate that employs her. Going activist with success, Hogg invited his Twitter audience to pressure top advertising accounts that supported Ingraham’s program to decamp from it. Further stabs at delegitimization were arrayed against Hogg. Other persons who shared his name—such as a mug-shotted 26-year old with a criminal record in South Carolina and no resemblance to the Parkland student—were asserted to be the “real” David Hogg (Garcia, 2018). In what may be a flak rite of passage, Hogg was also accused of Nazi affinities. More chilling, Hogg’s residence was “swatted.” In swatting, an armed Special Weapons and Tactics team is summoned by an anonymous phone “tip” alleging a situation (e.g., hostages taken) in order to trigger quasi-military intervention. People have in fact been killed in swatting incidents by innocently opening the front door (Ohlheiser, 2018).

Alongside emphatic praise for their activism, the tasteless vehemence of the flak efforts to discredit the students returns to the power asymmetries that characterize flak; in this specific case, issues-oriented flak on gun control that was cross-hatched with personalized flak at particular Parkland students. The pre-standing power symmetries that tilted against the students signified that they made difficult-to-fathom sacrifices of personal security and peace-of-mind to engage with gun control activism.

Keep Activism on the High Road

#MeToo may also be construed as activism. The movement presents dispersed activism that has blasted through millennia of male power and impunity protected by silence. Previously unassailable figures, most notably in politics and the entertainment industry, have been brought to heel by #MeToo’s methods. However, it must also be noted that a figure like the heinous Bill Cosby was not sentenced to prison by a series of tweets. Cosby met justice in a courtroom, with the full protections of a presumption of innocence and vigorous advocacy, before being judged as guilty of the crimes of which he was accused.

As much as figures such as Cosby demand comeuppance with justice for the victims, it must be noted that a world run on #MeToo logics radiates the distinct possibility of being bent from activism to flak. While it is unequivocally laudable that powerful men’s patterns of abuses have been confronted, tweets are not a substitute for due process. In this view, accusation that collapses ←47 | 48→into conviction is a decisive step backwards from liberal, Enlightenment concepts of justice and toward a stepped-up flak regime. Twitter is not a justice machine—no technology is—and the public must be vigilant that accusations do not become coterminous with conviction in ways that can readily converge with flak.