What If We *Didn’t* Resort to Anti-Intellectualism At This Exact Moment in Time?
By stacy lee kong
Image: instagram.com/nikitadumptruck
A note before we begin: As I explained in last week’s newsletter, when we’re talking about Israel and Palestine, it’s super important that we take care with our language, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. Whenever this conflict intensifies, there’s a corresponding rise in both antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes, and this most recent escalation is no exception. This week, Toronto police reported a 132% increase in reports of hate-motivated incidents, most of which were antisemitic in nature. So, as always, I want to be clear that we can never conflate the Israeli government and military with all Jewish people, just as we must not justify genocidal violence against Palestinians by pointing to Hamas’s actions. Also, because I know some people take issue with using words like colonization, genocide, apartheid or ethnic cleansing. I want to be clear that I’m using that language based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as academics who study genocide.
So, this might be a bit off-brand because Friday Things is all about thinking deeply about stuff, but one thing I haven’t really analyzed this year is the ‘girlification’ of the internet. I’ve mostly thought of all those ‘girl’ TikTok trends (girl math, girl dinner, clean girls, rat girls, strawberry girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, that girl, tube girls, etc.) as inside jokes or niche memes that took on overblown importance as they drew increasing attention, both on and off the app. I mean, ‘girl math’ was never meant to advocate for poor financial literacy; it was just a joke about how we all sometimes rationalize our financial decisions. Similarly, ’girl dinner’ didn’t initially glamorize disordered eating, it just acknowledged that sometimes we’re lazy and would rather eat popcorn for dinner instead of actually cooking something (which is a valid choice, for the record). And ‘girlsplaining’ complex topics? Well, sometimes you gotta meet people where they are, right?
But, it turns out there is a point where this stops feeling harmless for me, and it’s this point, when some content creators are trying to explain what’s happening in Israel and Palestine in ways that are just not appropriate. It’s making me look at the line between prioritizing accessible information and devolving into anti-intellectualism.
Perhaps the best example of this is TikTok influencer NikitaDumpTruck’s video girlsplaining Israel and Palestine. A self-described “queer comic/professor at bimbo university,” Nikita subscribes to bimbo feminism and creates content that subverts traditional ideas around who can be considered an expert, especially through explainers that tackle questions like why we can’t just print more money and how football works. The Israel/Palestine video, which Nikita deleted but which has been re-uploaded by other users, takes the same approach as her other explainers: it runs about a minute and 30 seconds and uses the metaphor of a birthday party venue to (ostensibly) make the conflict over Palestinian land easier to understand. I don’t actually think it achieved that goal to begin with, but more importantly, it glossed over a lot of pertinent details that didn’t fit in the metaphor of a birthday party venue—like, you know, the fact that Israel has been committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians for 75 years. After receiving a lot of critique rightfully pointing out that we don’t need to simplify genocide to make it easier to understand, Nikita has apologized and acknowledged where she went wrong, so I don’t necessarily think it’s useful to delve into the video itself. But I do think it’s a useful way to consider how a society-wide discomfort with pushing ourselves intellectually can shape our media consumption, communication and even our willingness to understand serious issues.
We are in a moment of Western anti-intellectualism—and not for the first time
This week, writer and director Caroline Renard summed this up very nicely on X/Twitter, saying, “y’all have taken the ‘I’m just a girl,’ and ‘adult teenager’ shit too far. Anti-intellectualism is killing me. Fucking read a book! Why you want to be dumb so bad? Lol.”
‘Anti-intellectualism’ feels like one of those concepts where we get what it means, but may not have a firm working definition, so maybe we start with that. According to Studio ATAO Center for Food and Social Justice, a non-profit research and advocacy organization that calls for more equitable standards for the food, beverage and hospitality industry, anti-intellectualism is “a social attitude that systematically undermines science-based facts, academic and institutional authorities, and the pursuit of theory and knowledge.” The org also argues that, while it’s often misunderstood as “mere hostility towards acquiring knowledge, or the byproduct of the lack of a formal education… this definition ignores how anti-intellectualism has been wielded by those with power, as a means to uphold the ideas and systems that benefit them, and thus enabling the continued expansion of these attitudes through society over time.”
This is not new, as journalist Abigail Bassett explained in a 2020 Shondaland article.
In her piece, she cited historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter, whose 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, is the foundational text about American anti-intellectualism. It argues this worldview is deeply embedded in American culture. “Everyone from Davy Crockett to Henry Adams embodied the idea of anti-intellectualism and highlighted the value that even early Americans put on the everyman over the expert. In his book, [Hofstadter] points to religion's role and the focus on superstition over science as the early harbingers of the now-ingrained American mentality,” she notes, in a synopsis that is significantly easier to parse than his actual essays. (The irony does not escape me.) She also points out that anti-intellectualism “has been used by totalitarian governments [around the world] to keep the public in the dark… including everyone from Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, Robert Mugabe, Nicolás Maduro and Slobodan Milosevic.”
How does a “hey girlypop” video fit into the paradigm of anti-intellectualism?
We are seeing the impact of this worldview everywhere right now—in Republicans’ demonization of critical race theory, in how Canadians engaged with advice from scientists and experts during COVID (a 2021 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found “preferences for COVID-19 news and COVID-19 information from experts dissipate among respondents with higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment”), in our collective response, or rather, lack of response, to climate science—and, in the news coverage of, discourse about and overarching framing of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, all of which can easily contain disinformation. So clearly, it’s important to understand how this movement can, and does, hamper our “ability to know and understand what is true and what is not,” as Bassett puts it. However, if it feels a little weird to position Nikita’s videos and others like it, which seem to be about the pursuit of accessible knowledge, within a worldview that’s about suppressing or ignoring knowledge, I get it.
I think this is where the concept of the everyman and the girlypop collide, though. The fundamental characteristic of anti-intellectualism isn’t actually about living in an information-less state; it’s actually about what information is prioritized, right? It assigns value, and maybe even morality, to ways of knowing, and says the type of knowledge that the everyman tends to have (practical, experiential, concise, simple) is better than the type of knowledge intellectual elites tend to have (theoretical, abstract, nuanced, complicated). In real life, functioning societies need both these styles of knowledge to succeed, of course. And, we can’t ignore the way intersecting identities impact perceived credibility. Even in a society that praises the everyman, marginalized groups are often told their practical knowledge, which is rooted in lived experience, is invalid, especially when it contradicts intellectuals’ theories. Who knows that better than young women, especially women of colour, whose expertise and understanding is often downplayed because of their perceived lack of intelligence, experience and/or objectivity?
I want to be careful here, because I strongly believe we should resist the idea that using slang or humour to make complex topics feel more accessible is inherently stupid, and that explaining topics in uncomplicated language is automatically inaccurate. I mean, a lot of what I try to do with Friday Things is to use celebrities or TikTok trends or other seemingly ‘unserious’ things as an entry point into deeper thinking about complex issues. I also feel uncomfortable with the argument that aligning the tropes of girlhood with accessible information is unfeminist or ‘sets feminism back.’ At the same time, there is something really uncomfortable about a young woman saying she’s simplifying big issues because that’s what the girlies want or need. So yeah, it actually does make sense to understand Nikita’s video, and others like it, as anti-intellectual in nature. Her popularity (she has almost 750,000 followers on TikTok) is also a sign of societal anti-intellectualism because it signals a desire for information that is easy to acquire and doesn’t ask anything more than passive watching.
Not every communication style needs to be applied to every situation
But there are some things that require—and deserve—effort. This is one of them.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think the conflict between Israel and Palestine is as complicated as people make it out to be. What’s more, positioning it as extremely complex is a deliberate rhetorical strategy that makes it easier for people to downplay, justify or straight-up look away from the atrocities Israel is currently carrying out against Palestinians, and has been carrying out for 75 years. I mean, how could anyone ever decide whether one side is justified in its actions if doing so requires you to grapple with land claims stretching back to Biblical times? (Sidenote: if you are interested in the question of who’s indigenous to this land, this Jewish Current comic from 2021 does a really good job of breaking down the issues around claims of Jewish Indigeneity, and the letters to the editor about the piece are also very thoughtful.) But you don’t have to know the entire history of this region to understand Hamas is committing war crimes against Israeli civilians and Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians—or that the impact of this conflict is not equal because of Israel’s long-standing oppression of Palestinian people, its greater resources (and appropriation of Palestinian resources) and its carte blanche support from Western allies, which Palestine does not receive. You just have to pay attention to what’s actually happening right now.
But Nikita’s girlsplaining video encourage us to do the opposite. This type of content is framed as ‘what you need to know,’ which implies a complete explanation, even though it’s actually reductive, decontextualized and oversimplified. And it’s not just about a lack of understanding; when we accept simple and short explanations, there can be consequences. As Sarah Schulman argued in New York magazine this week, “among political and institutional leaders, there has been a collective refusal to see this horrible violence as the consequence of consistent, unending brutality — paid for by the United States in billions of dollars in aid to Israel per year. Instead, a familiar fog has overtaken so many. They pretend these decades of injustice never took place. That Gazans were not forced against their will to live under siege. That instead, a group of them suddenly — out of nowhere and with no history or experience — emerged as monsters and murdered people who had never hurt them in the past and held no threat over their future.
Selective recognition is the way we maintain our own sense of goodness. Today, we see this process of denial in every aspect of our lives. In this moment, it has become a tool to justify the sustained murder of thousands in Gaza, where the current death toll sits at over 2,600 people. As Israel began its relentless retaliation last week, an accompanying image of Israeli and American moral cleanliness was put swiftly into action. This is called ‘manufactured consent’ — Noam Chomsky’s term for a system-supported propaganda by which authorities and media agree on a simplified reality, and it becomes the assumptive truth. We’ve seen this erasure of history in the uniform responses by western world leaders, university administrations, heads of foundations, and even book fairs over the past week.”
It takes more than watching an entertaining TikTok that clocks in at under two minutes to develop the understanding necessary to see through politicians’, journalists’ and celebrities’ attempts to manufacture consent. It takes emotional fortitude to engage with a seemingly never-ending stream of horrifying information, photos and video. It takes care to seek out many sources of information, from on-the-ground reporting to books, to first-hand accounts. It takes research to determine whether they’re credible or not, and media literacy to assess their biases. And most importantly, it requires thinking about what argument is being made (because there’s always an argument, even in seemingly straightforward news pieces), who’s making it, what their motivations might be and how it fits into the larger context of everything we’ve been reading. In all things, but especially this, we actually can’t just consume information; we have to judge its accuracy, and think about it in the context of our existing worldview and political frameworks.
All of which is to say, understanding the world around us does require effort, and that’s okay.
Three Places to Start
Some thoughts on media literacy.
Haymarket Books’ list of free ebooks for a free Palestine.
The Palestine Film Institute’s Unprovoked Narratives online film program, where anyone can stream 12 Palestinian films for free until Oct. 21.
And Did You Hear About…
Jezebel’s very fair take on celebrity journalism’s obsession with publishing Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce updates.
The New York Times’ round-up of the biggest revelations from Britney Spears’ upcoming memoir. (The paper “obtained [the book] from a retail store in advance of its authorized release,” which I’m pretty sure is just another way of saying, “somebody is getting fired.”)
#Cyclesyncing, the trend of planning your life according to the hormonal peaks and valleys of your menstrual cycle… which isn’t supported by data, and also “traffics in biological essentialism,” as writer Lindsay Gellman explains in The Cut.
Alex Abad-Santos’ thoughtful piece on why people are so tired of hearing about Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith’s marriage—and from Pinkett Smith in particular.
This important investigation on why so many storefronts feature floral installations these days.
Bonus: This X/Twitter thread of things that spark joy.
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