Violent crime is present in every large group of people. You can easily cherry pick stories telling about violent crime committed by refugees, immigrants or any minority group. Some of the stories most efficient in arousing emotions and political mobilising are the individually true ones. Right wing organisations cherrypick and redistribute stories about immigrant crime. The telling of a victim of a violent crime gives an emotional edge, and has a much deeper impact than statistics and numbers and other facts, that describe the bigger picture. Even though the individual story can tell no truth about crime or immigrants in general.
“Have you heard it? Have you heard it? There is a hen who has plucked out all her feathers just to please the rooster. She must be freezing to death; that is, if she isn’t dead already.”
As H C Andersen’s fairy tale about the single feather that became five hens after having been in the rumour mill in henhouses around town metaphorically describes the extremely powerful mechanism in spreading stories that wander verbally. Orally told and retold, stories can reach a wide audience in a short time, because they spread with exponential speed. They can also be spread over long distances. The multiplikator formula describe this efficiency. If one person tells a story to five people, and this is repeated 8 times, the story will potentially be able to reach an audience of 390,000.
Wandering stories (urban legends) are spread through person to person gossip or social media platforms, where there is no fact check. If it is true or not has nothing to say for if a wandering story is spread online. A study from MIT states that false stories are 70 % more likely to be retweeted than true stories. According to the story It takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. The researchers tracked roughly 126,000 cascades of stories spreading on Twitter, which were cumulatively tweeted over 4.5 million times by about 3 million people, from the years 2006 to 2017.
Critical Mass: When propaganda stories becomes folklore
The term critical mass describes the amount of a nuclear material needed to feed a self-sustaining chain reaction. It can be used as an analogy to explain how a social movement, innovation, or behaviour can reach a tipping point, where enough people have joined or adopted a narrative to make it self-sustaining and grow rapidly.
Fascism wins the terrain when the audience begins to tell the story itself, as put forward by historian Timothy Snyder. The right wing populist propaganda works and mobilise broad public support when the stories that are spread become folklore. This is when the politicians longer needs to push the narratives, since the stories circulates between people. When people start to retell the stories to each other.
The sharing of stories between people form a common informal subculture or culture. If they become a part of the daily talk between people in informal groups, a “talk of the town”, and in informal social groups, or on social media on the Internet.
Narrowly, the term folklore has been traditionally considered the oral tales of a society. More broadly, the term refers to all informal aspects of a culture – stories, beliefs, traditions, norms, behaviours, language, literature, jokes, music, art, foodways, tools and objects. Folklore can be seen as a common informal pool of information (or misinformation), shared in a group of people.
Mass produced culture and folklore sometimes overlap. But the the main difference between mass produced culture and folklore is that:
- Mass-produced culture, like broadcast and print media and popular culture, is mass distributed, by commercial entities, or for instance by state controlled media.
- Folklore is spread informally among people. What makes a story folklore is the sharing between people.
Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles
Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles are primarily defined by exclusion. An Echo chamber is, as defined by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, a social epistemic structure that other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited from. An epistemic bubble occurs when the critical voices, perhaps accidentally, have been left out. Some also choose to be silent.
Stories of violent immigrant crime enable right wing supporters to take the moral high ground in informal social fora. When somebody tells such dramatic stories, they can dominate the talk in the group. The stories told may appear to be non-partisan, but it is important to be aware that spreading stories about violent immigrant crime are an important part of the right wing strategy.
It is also not obvious that you are exposed to propaganda when you hear a story from somebody you trust personally. If such stories are told unopposed, they can make an informal sosial group or a social media group into an epistemic bubble.
It is a great advantage for right wing populists if they can seed themes what become discussed in daily talk among people. The discussion in informal groups of people can create epistemic bubbles. When there is absence of critical voices, stories of alleged violent crime can be broadcasted and amplified.
Peer pressure can make you not object when you hear a story. Some researchers have put forward that the conformity in epistemic bubbles are important for making gossip stories and rumours with strong negative biases generally accepted. It is not easy to decide if a new story somebody tells the truth, since you have never heard about it, and the claims are new to you. A natural response could be accepting, like “really, that was chocking”, not asking critical questions.
Epistemic bubbles can be individual, like a political partisan who gets his news only from one sided news sources, dismissing other sources as “Fake News“, or a conspiracy theorist. Some of the lone wolf terrorists have lived in epistemic bubbles created by conspiracy theories on the Internet. Epistemic bubbles can be real world social groups, or social media groups on the internet.
The interesting thing about digging up ghosts of old Nazis has been to study the methods they used to win popular support. This could possibly tell us about how the modern right-wing extremists propagate their ideology and, hopefully, prevent history from repeating itself.
The disaster when Hitler was handed power in a “coalition government” after the party reached over 30% of the votes in 1932, was fairly unique. The fact that East Germany experienced a flourishing of neo-Nazi organisations and racially-motivated violence in the chaos that evolved around the unification of Germany in 1990 makes the development in Germany at this time interesting as an object of investigation.
The extreme right-wing upsurge was primarily in East Germany, and, to a lesser extent, West Germany. At this time, immediately following unification, there was high unemployment and little political organisation in East Germany. There were also relatively few immigrants and refugees in East Germany. People therefore had less contact with immigrants and refugees and relied on handed down information and, sometimes, wild rumour.
Stories where the alleged perpetrator is member of an out-group of people the in-group have little social interaction with, have a greater chance of being retold. This illustrates that lack of social contact between groups of different cultures can make a fertile ground for xenophobia and foreign hate. Since the ones in out-group are not present in discussions in majority groups, they can not defend their own reputation.
Common Stereotypes circulate in informal groups
A stereotype is a generalisation that all members in a group or category of people share the same social behaviour:
- Gender: “Men don’t cry. Women are too emotional.”
- Race/Ethnicity: “Black people are athletic. Hispanics are all immigrants.”
- Nationality: “Americans are loud. Germans are always punctual.”
- Profession: “Artists are disorganised. Lawyers are greedy.”
We all participate in informal social groups, like our family, friends, lunch gang, sewing circle, in the pub and in the cafe, football supporters group or religious groups. These groups can function as micro political arenas, where political ideas are shaped, and may be conformed and strengthened when there is no critical voice. The information flow in such informal groups has else no fact check or reality control.
Research on attitudes among young people from East Germany that indicates that the ones having negative stereotypes of immigrants and refugees had verbal communication in informal groups, like friends and family, as their primary information source. This was before the Internet became common. In addition to the physically existing social groups, there are epistemic bubbles and echo chambers that exist mainly on social media platforms on the Internet, see section 3 , section 9, and section 13
In an investigation from the former German Democratic Republic in 1990, it was stated that:
“Informal groups presumably have a higher degree of subjectivity. The tendency to reproduce opinions and moods by oneself, far from any objectivity and reality, entails a great danger of increasing false images and enemy images of the foreigners who live here. This is emphasised by the connection between increasing dissatisfaction with oneself and intolerance on the one hand, and more frequent information in friendship and acquaintance circles about foreigners on the other” (Friedrich/Schubarth 1991).
Mary Diane Cantrell, who has researched on urban legends, suggests in her master thesis that shared urban legends (wandering stories) have a function, tying the group together: “Legends provide a way for people to bond with one another. Even if a group is made up of people who do not know one another, sharing a story about how a local retailer refuses to support troops or how a local chain restaurant uses subpar ingredients in its dishes can make the group feel like a cohesive bunch. By sharing the outrage that Starbucks will not send coffee to troops in the Middle East, for example, is an easy way for the group to have something in common and to bond over.”
It sometimes demands requires courage to break the conformity by correcting the facts or asking for sources or if the story is representative, when a biased, negative story about somebody from an out-group is shared in a group of people. Speaking up in defence of a person or group of people can feel daunting, as you may fear offending others or disrupting the atmosphere.
Cantrell describes the way social groups conform around a story so that it develops into an epistemic bubble without external input: “Additionally, human nature may drive a member of the group who either does not believe the story, or does not believe they are hearing the whole story, not to voice disbelief as it could jeopardise their acceptance in the group. At the same time, the person who shared the story has not only created an opportunity for the group to converge, but has also possibly met some emotional needs by making himself feel important for breaking the ice and sharing the tantalising information that others have responded to with strong emotion.”
The story about the “vicious and blood thirsty criminals“, not about the criminal statistics
Half true stories are like Trojan horses; they carry a small truth to sneak in a larger deception. Selective storytelling of immigration crime are subversive tactics that can be used to seise power.
What happens when a story of crime committed by an out-group is not entirely fabricated, but true, or at least partially true? These narratives pack an even greater political punch than outright lies. Crimes are committed by people of every social strata, colour, nationality, and religion, but selective storytelling transforms isolated incidents into a tool for inducing fear and antipathy.
Partially true stories are resilient. Unlike falsehoods, they are harder to refute. How do you counter a narrative when a victim publicly confirms its details? This emotional authenticity makes them powerful weapons in the arsenal of propaganda.
Selective storytelling
Right-wing organisations have perfected cherry picking immigrant crime stories. In Scandinavia, these groups have been known to comb through media reports, and encourage activists to collect and share such incidents about refugees and immigrants. These stories have then been spread online. Researchers Anton Törnberg and Mattias Wahlström studied the Facebook group “Stand Up for Sweden,” which boasted over 167,000 members. They found that group members selectively gathered and circulated stories about immigrant crime.
“External media sources were used by group members to demonstrate and criticise:
(1) that Sweden and Swedish values are under threat;
(2) that Swedes, especially Swedish men, face ‘reverse discrimination’; and
(3) the prevalence of a politically correct elite producing ‘Fake News.'”
Although these stories might be factually true individually, their total presentation is disinformation because the selection of data is statistically unrepresentative. The careful curation of such stories leads to a misleading portrayal, painting a bias of a group of people as inherently dangerous while ignoring the broader context.
Selective storytelling is related to the genre of populism and not to logical rhetoric, as defined in chapter 1. Selective storytelling is populism and not logical rhetoric as it is based on the telling of a story. Selective storytelling does not try to refer to facts or numbers in the same way as logical rhetoric do.
An individual story can not tell general truth:
A pebble can not explain a beach. Because of their individual focus, a story of a single crime can not possibly tell any truth about refugees, immigrants and crime on a general level. The core of the matter is individual responsibility, not collective blame. The crime of one individual belongs to that individual alone. Violent crime is present in every large group of people. You can easily cherry pick stories telling about crime committed by refugees, immigrants or any minority group. Or by a member of the majority, as demonstrated by the Epstein case.
An individually true story of a tragic crime can be used in a political campaign. A main focus of right wing populists is spotlighting stories about individual immigrant crime to undermine a political rival. The idea they propagate is that there consists a threat of violent immigrant crime against defenceless victims, that their political rivals do not confront, or even enable.
Right wing populists spread a mix of false and true stories about immigrant crime. Some of the stories that make greatest political impact are the individually true ones. Selective storytelling is a commonly used tool in right wing populism.
Right wing organisations selectively gather and present stories with refugees and immigrants as perpetrators as political campaigns. Some of these stories might be factually accurate individually. These stories can spread more or less unopposed by campaigning politicians, by influencers, or by editorially controlled news media, since the fact checks will not object to them.
Similar stories could be handpicked about any selection of people that is large enough. Violent crime is present among all nations and ethnical groups, religious groups, and among people of all colours. But this is not a question about logics.
These emotional responses are still far stronger than dry statistical facts, such as evidence showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens as shown in chapter 10. BBC states that the Biden administration forced out two million people from USA between January 2021 and 11 May 2023.
Trump’s playbook: Stories that stoke emotions
Donald Trump has especially picked stories of sexually motivated murders done by undocumented immigrants. ABC News describes how Donald Trump repeated false claims that Kamala Harris had “over 647,572 migrant criminals for Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, plunder and kill the people in the United States of America” in rallies in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Reuter states that «Trumps attacks are from a well-thumbed playbook he has used repeatedly since first running for office in 2015 to cast immigrants illegally crossing the southern border as violent criminals.— He typically focuses on young, usually white, women allegedly killed by Hispanic.” For example:
- Jocelynn Nungaray: Trump used the story of the 12-year-old, allegedly killed by two undocumented Venezuelan men, to accuse President Biden of enabling rapists and murderers.
- Rachel Morin: Trump blamed Biden for the brutal murder of Morin by a man wanted for murder in El Salvador, connecting the crime to the administration’s border policies.
In both cases, the Trump campaign actively reached out to the victims’ families, incorporating their tragedies into campaign narratives. At rallies, grieving relatives called for stricter border controls, their stories stirring anger and fear among audiences.
The emotional edge: our hormones are triggered
We can easily identify with the victim of a violent crime. It is also easier to identify with a single victim than with a group of victims. When we hear a story about a defenceless person that suffer a brutal crime, it rises our hormonal levels. This could also explain why arguments about immigration often are emotional.
The neuroscientist Paul J. Zak has worked on assessing the influence of storytelling. According to his research, our brain love stories because “as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.”
Zak states that a dramatic story trigger our brains to send powerful hormones that control our emotions through our bodies. When Zak and his colleagues showed a dramatic film of a father and son struggling with cancer, they found that both cortisol and oxytocin spiked in nearly all of the viewers—and that most of them donated a portion of their earnings from the experiment to nonprofits.
Fear and anger makes you lose perspective
A sexually motivated murder is an especially morally disgusting crime. The perpetrator deliberately deprive the victim of her body, her feelings, her dignity and finally her life.
A story of a brutal crime against a defenceless victim trigger powerful emotions in us,- fear of the threat, empathy for the victim and outrage at the perpetrator on behalf of the victim. Fear and anger are blunt emotions in the way that they make you loose perspective. Anger make you feel strong and gives you a feeling of control over distress and fear. At the same time anger gives you “tunnel vision”, in the sense that you do not consider nuances or the broader picture.
The logical connection between these individual sexually motivated crimes and border policies of the competing political party is weak at best. Everybody who has been at a border control knows that it can be a a challenging situation with long queues, and that an individual error by a border officer can happen.
The Norwegian newspaper VG reports that the procedures were not followed, when the suspect of the murder of Morin was returned to Mexico instead of being held and DNA-tested. He should after the routines the have been extradited to El Salvador, where he was wanted. Instead, he managed to cross the border into USA on his forth attempt.
Yet, logic is not the point. The stories provoke strong emotional reactions and cries for action. The strong emotions easily drown out nuanced discussions, or if the cause of an individual crime in reality is the border control regime of the opposing political party. The emotions grab the attention of the audience, provides a political focus towards the portrayed problems and divert the attention from important political issues.
Tunnel vision or the bigger picture ?
Tunnel vision created by selective storytelling prevent us from seeing the broader picture. Selective storytelling is not about truth. It is about emotional impact. By focusing on individual tragedies, these narratives obscure broader realities and promote harmful stereotypes. These stories stir emotions, influence opinions, and advance political agendas.
To counter such tactics, it is essential to recognise the power of emotional narratives and to balance them with critical thinking and comprehensive perspectives. The truth is not just what is told, but also what is left out. If it is ment to be a general description of a group, remember the stories of all the people from minorities, immigrants and refugees who live their lives as peacefully as good citizens.